


Atonement

by Auntarctica, sub_textual



Series: Such Divine Purpose [3]
Category: Devil May Cry
Genre: All the misunderstandings ever, Angst, Blow Jobs, Dante is such a brat, Dante shows his motivation, Dom/sub Undertones, Inappropriate use of Yamato, Judgement Fuck, M/M, POV Alternating, Porn with Feelings, Post-DMC5, Rimming, Vergil opens a different kind of portal, Yes you read that right, so much sex
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-18
Updated: 2019-06-26
Packaged: 2020-05-13 21:51:46
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 23,667
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19259836
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Auntarctica/pseuds/Auntarctica, https://archiveofourown.org/users/sub_textual/pseuds/sub_textual
Summary: “You never have to apologize to me, brother. But you may have to atone.”Takes place one week afterParousia.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Dante is written by sub_textual. Vergil is written by Auntarctica.

The sun is barely climbing in the sky when Vergil opens his pale eyes. 

He is disoriented, for a moment, by plaster and textiles, instead of the vaulted chill of demonic palaces, but the spells are less, and of lesser duration, each day he wakes up here. _Here_ is Dante’s agency, Dante’s bedroom, Dante’s bed. And it follows that his brother is beside him, naked and soundly slumbering, sprawled and half-swathed in the sheets in a way that’s conveniently modesty-preserving.

Vergil turns on his side to look at him. It is not any less of a marvel, waking up beside him; even after several days, the novelty has yet to tarnish. He watches as Dante’s chest rises and falls. His breathing is light and even, and his sleeping face is reminiscent of a graveyard angel’s.

Vergil nearly reaches for his brother’s cock. It’s the first ruthless impulse that stirs in him, looking at Dante in the close, warm, drowsy morning, but he hesitates, withdrawing his hand when he sees how deep Dante’s sleep is. This is something new, to hear his brother tell it. Something that’s only happened in the last few days.

Vergil is loath to wake him. Instead, he presses a kiss to Dante’s slightly parted but insensate lips, sitting upright and running his fingers back through his hair, which is sleep-tousled and unruly. It falls into place obediently, conforming to a learned motion.

It has been less than a week, but perhaps that is long enough for him to venture out into the human world, and begin to remember his place in it. Or begin to make one.

He dresses swiftly, silently, and leaves his brother slumbering, closing the door gently behind him.

Outside the human world is stirring. The demon world never sleeps.

*

It’s rare that Dante can ever enjoy a good night of sleep. Rarer still, that he manages to sleep through the night and deep into the morning, until the sun spills golden across his skin. 

He’d spent twenty-four years trying to stay awake at night. It was dangerous when he closed his eyes and let his mind rest. Memory clawed its way back to the surface every time he let himself drift, forcing him to lose everything he’d ever loved again and again. He would close his eyes and watch his brother fall. Close his eyes and watch him disintegrate into dust. Close his eyes, and there was Vergil again—dying, or falling away from him, or turning his back and walking away. 

The sky would break open and demons would fall, and their house would burn down, as their mother screamed, and Vergil would fall endlessly into an abyss deeper and darker than even the blackest of nights. Vergil would fall, and Dante would wake up in a cold sweat, his fingers shaking, his heart racing, the taste of smoke and blood in his mouth. 

Alcohol sometimes took the edge off, blunting the sharpness of the memory, but not the ache it left behind. But sleep was never restful, and only a necessity that the human part of him required. If he could have forgone it entirely, he would’ve—and more often than not, Dante caught snatches of it behind his desk or on the couch. 

But in Vergil’s arms, Dante sleeps better than he has in a lifetime. 

His blood thrums in perfect harmonic resonance with his brother’s; his soul stops restlessly seeking its other half. 

Vergil chases his nightmares away, just like he did when they were boys.

Dante stirs as the sun pours through the slats of the blinds, cutting across his face. It’s a slow rousing, but even in his state somewhere between sleep and wakefulness, Dante’s already reaching for Vergil, his hand seeking the warmth of his brother, only to curl into air. 

He frowns, eyes slowly blinking open as they blearily try to focus, searching for his brother.

The space next to him is empty.

Dante’s eyes snap open. He shoots up, his heart slamming up into his chest as a fist closes around his lungs. He tries to tell himself that it’s nothing. Maybe his brother is just in the bathroom or downstairs. Vergil wouldn’t leave him again, not after everything—not after the promise they had made to each other. 

_Promise me you’ll never leave me again._

Vergil wouldn’t break that promise. He had given Dante his word, along with his surrender, allowing Dante to consecrate the sacredness of the moment with himself. 

_I promise, I promise, I promise._

No, Vergil wouldn’t leave him again. 

Dante closes his eyes to center himself for a moment and takes a deep breath, then scans the room—and that’s when he realizes that his brother’s clothes are gone, along with his boots. It hits him suddenly—the old, familiar emptiness, an absence that he only ever feels when Vergil isn’t close enough for their blood to resonate, when he’s too far away for Dante to sense at all. 

Vergil _left._

 _He fucking left._

Everything burns and Dante’s out of bed within a second, and yanks on his clothes. That bastard doesn’t get to come back from the fucking dead and come home with him and fuck him and sleep in his bed and promise him he’ll never leave again only to disappear again to fuck-knows-where, but it sure as hell can’t be good, because whenever Vergil just disappears like this, it usually ends with one of them with a sword through his goddamn chest. 

Tears streak down his face, but Dante’s too damn angry to even bother wiping them away, as he pulls on his coat and storms down the stairs and out the door, picking up his guns along the way. 

He’s going to find his dumbass brother.

He’s going kick his ass. Again. 

And then he’s going to drag him home, before Nero catches wind of any of this.

It will be a cold day in hell before Dante lets Vergil leave him again. 

*

When Vergil returns, he is coolly pleased with himself. He has a pound of coffee under one arm, and a box of assorted pastries from the boulangerie down the street—he doesn’t know what Dante likes, but he presumes all of them. It occurs to him to wonder if Dante even has a coffee maker. If not, he has champagne and peach nectar. Dante won’t know what a Bellini is, but Vergil has no doubt he’ll approve.

And after a civilized breakfast, he will give Dante something else in bed. It seems like a fine plan, all told.

He sets everything on the counter of the wet bar. Dante has nothing approaching even a kitchenette, to Vergil’s mild dismay. They will have to talk about improving their domestic situation, soon, since his return, and since Dante is no longer, de facto, a bachelor. Vergil doesn’t anticipate much of a fight—not now that little brother has his heart’s desire.

He goes to the bedroom, and cracks the door to glance inside, expecting to see his demonic angel of a sibling still slumbering aesthetically. Instead, he frowns. The bed is empty, the covers hastily displaced. Dante’s coat and boots, thrown off in a fit of passion the night before, are conspicuously absent.

“God dammit,” Vergil says.

He has no idea where his brother has gone, but it’s just like him to ruin the first grand human gesture Vergil tries to make.

*

Night settles quietly upon the city. 

Dante had spent the entire day aimlessly searching for his brother, wandering without direction, desperately hoping to feel the pull of Vergil’s blood somewhere. _Anywhere_. But his blood remained quiet and still. And that feeling inside of him, the one armed with teeth, started to fester. 

He ended up on the outer limits of the city, where there were biker bars and strip clubs and a few run-down burger joints, but no Vergil. He almost considered searching for dark pockets of energy, where there might be a portal, but he had no idea where to even begin. With Yamato in hand, Vergil could very well just have cut a damn hole anywhere he liked. He didn’t even need a pre-existing rift. He could just disappear and go anywhere, and that’s just the thing isn’t it. 

Dante has no idea where the fuck Vergil would even go. 

Or where to even begin looking for him.

So he ends up going home, because he can’t just waste his time walking all the streets in the city to find a brother who clearly doesn’t want to be found. 

He’s a block and a half away from Devil May Cry when he suddenly feels it—the siren call of Vergil’s blood, pulsing deep within him. 

He breaks into a hard run, tearing down the alley in a streak of red, chasing after his brother—which leads him straight back home.

Dante bursts through the doors, heart thundering against his ribs, lungs shuddering with breath. 

And there, perched on his couch, is his brother, with a book in one hand and a drink in the other, looking pretty damn comfortable where he sits. Acting like he hadn’t fucking _left_ to do whatever the fuck it was he went to do, leaving Dante alone in bed. 

_Leaving_ him, when he’d promised it was something he’d never do again. 

“ _Vergil._ ” It comes out ragged, nearly broken, as Dante stands in the doorway, trying not to shake. 

“Brother mine,” drawls Vergil, finishing his page and looking up after a deliberate beat. “You made it home for dinner.”

He’d missed breakfast, of course—the continental one Vergil had taken pains to procure from these mortal establishments—and lunch, presumably, had they intended to indulge in such a thing. But here was Dante, looking disheveled and bedraggled, like he’d fought a horde of demons.

“Let me guess,” said Vergil. “You took a job. Good for you, but the Danishes are stale now.” 

Dante had spent the entire day tearing up the city, looking for his douchebag of a brother who had decided it was a good idea to wake up in the morning and leave him alone, and all he has to say for it is _the Danishes are stale._ As though he hadn’t, in fact, fucking broke his promise and left. 

He stares at his brother with rage and relief and hurt boiling under his skin, unsure if he should summon his sword and slam it into Vergil for good measure to keep him in place, or if he should fall to his knees before him and wrap his arms around his waist and press his face into his lap. Because even though Vergil had left to do whatever it was he felt like needed to be done, he came back. He came home. 

“No, brother,” he ends up saying instead, still not moving from his spot at the door. Not entirely trusting his own body, when it’s telling him to prepare for war. “I was out looking for you.” He swallows past the knot in his throat, emotion burning harshly in his gaze. “Where were you?”

Vergil studies his brother; takes in his stricken gaze, his semi-aggressive stance, and the deadly calm in his strained, quiet voice. He frowns and marks his place, setting the book aside. “Did something happen while I was gone?”

The champagne is in the refrigerator, along with the peach nectar, but the box of pastries and the bag of coffee still sit on the bar top. He does not expect Dante to notice these details. Even less so when he has the kind of singularity of focus and red-tinged tunnel vision he’s leveling at Vergil now.

Vergil takes a sip of his drink. It’s not a Bellini; those are for morning, and it is well into evening, now. He supposes they can salvage the night. He doesn’t feel like leaving again. Being out in the human world will take some getting used to. “Why were you looking for me?”

 _Really_ , Dante thinks to himself _._ This is how Vergil wants to play it.

Sitting there like he hadn’t left, asking if _something happened_ like he’d been here the whole time, when they both know that sure as fuck ain’t the case. 

It’s like a wire tripping, sparks igniting fury as a burst of electricity sizzles down into Dante’s fingertips, which he clenches into a fist before he does something stupid, like summon his sword before he’s actually ready to use it. 

Vergil’s made himself unreadable—his eyes are as calm as a cold winter’s day; an iced over lake Dante can’t see the bottom of. His brother’s beautiful face has arranged itself into an expression as smooth as glass. 

Dante wants to put his fist right through it.

“You’ve got some nerve,” he says far too quietly, his breath gusting out of him with trembling, barely contained rage. “You’re really gonna act like you didn’t just fucking _leave_ this morning? Really? I spent the entire fucking day looking for you because _you left!_ ” Dante stalks forward towards his brother as his voice rises, his chest heaving with anger as the fire in his blood explodes outwards, a devastating conflagration that burns all the way up to his eyes until they’re glinting with it. 

“I seriously thought you were over that power hungry, world dominating bullshit, but _nope!_ You just can’t fucking get enough of that shit, _can you?!_ What happened to our promise, huh? Why the fuck did you even make it when all you were gonna do was _break_ it? All that shit about no one leaving anyone—that didn’t mean _shit_ did it?! _”_

“I promised not to leave you alone, Dante. Not to never leave the house.” Vergil knows his voice is maddeningly calm, and unlikely to assuage Dante’s rage, as this attribute of his has inflamed his brother since they were children.

“Oh, that’s rich,” Dante says with a scoff of derision, his entire body shaking with fury as he stalks straight into his brother’s space, tempted to wipe that cold mask of indifference right off his perfect face with a fist. “Where the fuck did you go _this_ time, huh? Didja make a lil’ round trip to hell and back and think I wouldn’t notice?”

“I was nowhere near the demon world.”

“Then where the hell were you?!” 

Vergil’s lips form an unimpressed line. “This morning I woke up, intent on a new campaign of global conquest, and naturally, I chose the most obvious place to mount this nascent offensive: the corner bakery.”

Dante is in some kind of a state, that much is clear. Vergil gazes up at him for a long moment, eyes narrowed. “I was gone for an hour, no more.”

He will allow that his brother is particularly fetching when he’s outraged, but he can’t help but feel irked at being so thoroughly misunderstood. Vergil knows he’s done plenty in the past, but that’s irrelevant here, when he wasn’t so much trying to rule humanity as become part of it—and all because it’s the price of making his little brother happy.

He feels himself get a little angry too, looking into Dante’s judgmental, recriminating gaze, which has been leveled on him a bit too much of late, he thinks, in the course of their tumultuous reunification.

“You want me to be human,” he bites out, the words edged and overenunciated. “So I did human things. I bought fucking coffee beans, Dante.”

“Wait— _what?_ ” 

Coffee beans.

Vergil bought _coffee beans._

Dante’s breath catches in his throat as all the fury that had been building inside of him abruptly dissipates; a light blinking out in the middle of a storm. The whiplash of it stuns him, leaving him speechless for a moment, as he tries to process the fact that his brother hadn’t actually left him this morning; that he had gone out to buy coffee, and came home. That he hadn’t snuck off to open a portal to the underworld, but was here the entire time—trying to be human.

And Dante was the trigger-happy bastard who had taken his kindness and spat on it, and then accused him of falling into bad habits. Accused him of breaking a promise that Vergil had no intention of truly breaking at all.

He lets out a breath that’s as much disbelief as it is relief, and raises a hand up to his wet eyes, rubbing at them as he pinches the bridge of his nose. 

“Shit,” he says, feeling like the world’s biggest asshole, his shoulders slumping as all the fight goes out of him. He looks back down at his brother, who is now clearly angry with him. Rightfully so, for once. Dante’s suddenly exhausted. Drained. “Haven’t you ever heard of leaving a note?” he asks quietly, without a hint of sarcasm in his tone. “I thought—” He takes a bracing breath, his eyes dropping down to the ground before him. “I thought you left me again.” 

Vergil is silent for a moment. “I did. I left you sleeping, because for once you were sleeping well enough that you didn’t even stir when I kissed you.”

He understands, now, the fear that had gripped his brother, and that it’s not entirely unwarranted, either, given their history. He cannot even call this fear irrational, as it has proven itself to be justified all too often.

“And no,” he admits, reluctantly. “It didn’t occur to me. To leave a note, that is. I’ve been alone for years; coming and going as I pleased. I’m not used to being...tethered.” He makes a face after he says it, as this is surely not the optimal word. He tries again. “Enmeshed.” A shrug, as he settles on, “Owned.”

Dante sighs, running a hand wearily over his face. Of course, Vergil wouldn’t think to leave a note. It’s not like he’s had a whole lot of human contact in twenty years. He’s still relearning what it means to be alive, and how to walk in the sun with his brother. How to be himself, again. 

Dante really can’t fault him for any of that. 

If anything, he’s the one to blame for it. 

After all, of the two of them, only one of them actually successfully killed the other.

And it sure as hell wasn’t Vergil.

Dante takes a step forward towards the couch, and then another, then deposits himself down next to his brother, hunching forward with his elbows on his thighs. For a moment, he doesn’t say anything at all. He just sits there, trying to wrap his head around the fact that Vergil feels _owned_. When in fact, hadn’t it always been the other way around?

 _Mine, as ever_ , Vergil had said, just a few nights ago

Dante has always taken pride and comfort in knowing that he has always belonged to Vergil. 

He had thought that after all they had been through, after he had taken claim of the precious gift of his brother’s surrender, that maybe Vergil felt that way, too. That he could find something meaningful in belonging to Dante, the way Dante has always belonged to him.

But the way Vergil says it almost sounds like it’s not something he particularly cares for. 

“Is that how you really feel?” he asks after a while, then turns his head to look at Vergil. “Like I’ve got you on a leash?” 

Vergil is surprised at the words. Slowly, he turns to look at his brother. “Shouldn’t I be?” The words are ironic, but also not entirely levitous. “I haven’t given you a lot of reasons to trust my intentions. If you had a dog that kept escaping the yard to…” He shook his head. “Open the gates to hell, you’d keep him where you could see him, wouldn’t you?”

He sighs and settles back, letting himself ease deeper into the encompassing leather embrace of Dante’s stylishly-worn chesterfield.

“I don’t feel leashed. Not by you, anyway. I feel bound. It’s not the same thing. One is a burden, the other is a pact. I chose these bonds. I want them. Desire them. And if that means a sticky note on the fridge” —he grimaces, briefly, at the pure and maudlin domesticity of such a thing—”then so be it.”

Dante lets out the breath that he’d been holding and nods, swallowing a bit past the knot that had formed in his throat. He reaches a hand out and finds his brother’s, curling his fingers around Vergil’s. Needing an anchor in the stormy waters he’d suddenly found himself knee-deep in. It’s immediately grounding, the feeling of Vergil’s hand in his. Steadying. 

He weaves their fingers together.

It’s a difficult thing, trust.

Especially when it’s so fragile.

Dante knows he’s going to need to work on it, learning how to trust his brother. Learning how to believe him when he says he wants this. That he’s choosing Dante for once in their lives. That he’ll always come home. That he’ll never leave again.

But the fear that had gripped him so viscerally still crouches in the shadows. 

Dante can still feel where it’d dragged its claws. 

He stares at his brother’s hand in his own. Tightens his fingers a little. “Look, Vergil… I’m sorry,” he finally says, even though he’s never been really good at apologies. This is a new part of their dynamic. Something they never used to do. “I just… I woke up this morning and you were gone and I…” He sighs. “I’ll try not to jump to conclusions next time.” 

Vergil eyes him sidelong for a beat. “I brought you three kinds of croissants, three Danishes, an apple fritter, a selection of macarons just in case you hate pastry—which I doubt, because it’s basically pizza with sugar—and something called a beaver tail.”

Dante’s hand on his own is warm, his grasp firm; maybe even a little urgent. He slowly tightens his own fingers in response. “I’ll leave a note next time,” he says. 

He lets his thumb ease over Dante’s. “And you don’t have to apologize. Not to me. I think both of us know how many regrets have passed between us.”

There is a slight bitterness in the words he can’t fully sieve. Even as they sit side by side, fingers entwined, the weight of all their lost years hovers in the periphery. He knows that with time it will fade. Vergil knows something about time, and bad memories.

It hasn’t been long, after all. Not even a week. They struggle, separately, privately, with the extant complications and remorse of their star-crossed bond, even now that their stars are aligned, and his brother’s presence by his side fills him with more power than he ever thought possible, even in his most ruthless dreams.

Someday, he thinks, they will crush all of these old fears beneath a greater weight, that of new memories. Perhaps Dante will never cease to fear the worst in Vergil’s absence, but his fears will also be proven wrong. He’s determined in this. As determined as he ever was to win the world and become a god.

“No,” he says. “You never have to apologize to me, brother. But you may have to atone.”

“Atone,” Dante repeats, his brows flinching together briefly. His brother turns to look at him then, and the look in his eyes isn’t at all the look of a man who is expecting penitence; instead, it’s a look Dante knows quite well. The kind that ignites a different kind of fire inside of him entirely. One coupled with a raised eyebrow and a nearly imperceptible tilt of one corner of his brother’s sumptuous mouth, as he dips his head elegantly, then lets his gaze slide right down at his crotch.

Dante’s eyes follow instinctively.

 _Oh_ , is all he can think, as warmth floods through his chest and slides south when realization settles within him. 

He huffs a slightly amused breath as his eyes track back up to his brother’s face. “So you want me to atone, huh?” He slips his hand out of Vergil’s, in favor of letting it slide onto his brother’s thigh, as he shifts on the couch to face him. His fingers drift down towards Vergil’s inner thigh as the ever-present pulse of desire for his brother in his blood slowly rears its head. 

“Just what kind of atonement are we talking about, brother?” 

“The kind you like best,” Vergil purrs darkly, leaning back, letting his thighs spread under his brother’s touch, lifting his arm and letting it drape elegantly along the spine of the couch.

He reaches out with the other hand, gently pushing Dante’s hair aside, out of his eyes. Above his sly, slight grin his brother’s light gaze holds emotions deeper and more complicated than his playful manner suggests.

“I had intended breakfast in bed. That’s a very human thing to do, isn’t it?” He studies the masculine lines of Dante’s face, the silvered motes of incipient stubble that Dante doubtless missed that morning in the service of his mad pursuit. “I thought so, anyway. I planned to wake you with coffee, feed you delicacies and elixirs at leisure, and afterward, reaffirm the rightness of our reunion, brother. Slowly. Achingly. Physically.”

The words send a hot shudder down Dante’s spine. The heat coils its way down into his belly, slowly filling out his cock. 

He’s filled with regret for having assumed the worst of Vergil, missing out on what would have been a decadent morning of delicious food and drink and lovemaking. Trying to make up for all the years they had lost, all the time they’ll never be able to get back. 

“Damn,” he says softly, without the teasing affectation his voice sometimes takes on during times like this. He’s genuinely contrite. “I’m really gonna have to make it up to ya, huh?” 

His hand dips further down as he gives his brother’s thigh a slow squeeze. It would be so easy to simply run his hand straight up and cup Vergil’s cock through his pants, tease him to full hardness before pulling him out. But sitting next to him like this doesn’t quite feel right. Not now, not when Vergil is expecting _atonement_. 

Not when Dante desperately also wants to make things right.

“How would you like me, brother?” The question is as soft as the way his lashes lower, almost demurely, as he dips his head slightly in deference.

“You know I like you any way I can get you,” Vergil says, with ardent solemnity. “But right now, it would please me to see you on your knees.” His hand covers Dante’s where it rests on his thigh. He leans in to kiss his brother’s still, parted lips—a sensuous brush, promising much more. “When I left, you were naked. Disarmed. I expected to find you that way when I returned.” He withdraws, settling back into the couch. “So strip for me, Dante. I want you bare and on your knees before me.”

The order slowly rolls through Dante like thunder. 

It settles somewhere deep within him, the feeling of Vergil’s claim over him slowly taking hold. 

“As you wish, brother,” he murmurs and rises off the couch, turning to face his brother, the tails of his coat fluttering slightly in the process. This is no strip tease—there’s no playful divesting of his clothing to be scattered carelessly wherever it might land. There’s no outrageous dance, paired with salacious thrusts of his hips, no theatrical performance. No _showmanship_. There’s only this: the thud of his guns as they hit the floor; the quiet rustle of leather as it slips off his shoulders. The whisper of threadbare cotton across his skin, and the low clink of metal as his belt is undone. 

This is Dante, stripped down, standing bare before his brother, pulling off his gloves and letting them drop to the ground. 

This is Dante, falling to his knees before his brother, his cock hard and at the ready, his hands sliding up over Vergil’s knees as he looks up at his reason for everything; as he gazes up at his other half with all the aching love in him thudding quietly in his chest. 

He doesn’t know if he’ll ever find absolution; if he even deserves it. But Vergil allows him to atone. Lets him pay penance the only way he really knows how.

Vergil gazes down at him, emotions warring in his chest that his face does not betray.“Your body is beautiful,” he says. “It always was.”

He reaches out to touch his brother, tracing fingertips along his prominent pectorals, and down the ripples of his stomach.

“The funny thing is, it’s even better now than it was back then.” Vergil breathes out, scarcely able to hold the reality of his brother’s raw beauty in mind. Dante is a vision on his knees, a powerful figure bent in willing submission. There is a power in that, all its own.

“In the netherworld, I would think of this body. This body against mine. Under mine. This body over me, inside me. Being inside this body: the temple for all that matters in this world.” He pauses. “But none of that can approximate the reality.”

He reaches out to rake his fingers through the thick raw silk of his brother’s unruly mane. Vergil’s voice drops to an indulgent murmur. “Did you think of me, Dante? Like I thought of you, all those pitch-black nights?”

Dante’s eyes slide shut as he lets his head fall forward. Trying to hold the pieces of himself together, trying not to come apart with just one touch, like he has every single time they’ve made love since Vergil’s return.

He doesn’t know if there’s any vocabulary in any language that could express the depth of his mourning—how impossible it was for him to think of anything else. How devastating it was, to recall the memory of his brother’s touch, his brother’s kiss, the way it once felt to have been beautiful and whole for a shining, breathless moment in his brother’s arms. Arms that he thought he’d never feel again; arms that he longed for during the long, endless nights of blood, when not even the thrill of killing meant anything anymore. When all he could feel was the magnitude of loss, the way it carved into him and emptied him out until all that was left was just a shell of the man he once was—a body with half a soul, a body that wasn’t even really alive, when there was no breath in his lungs. When the only air he wanted to breathe was his brother.

How do you put into words what it was like to only have half a soul? How do you express how impossible it was to even think of living a life without him, a life that couldn’t be a life at all, when you were the one who killed him, the one who let him go; the one who didn’t chase after him to hell, all those years ago? The one who didn’t fight hard enough, who wasn’t good enough to save him from himself. The one who he didn’t love enough to stay alive in your arms.

It could have been beautiful. You could have been perfect together, like you once were, when life was easy and young and the darkness was held at bay, and laughter was as bright as the summer sun. And though the life you could had have together wouldn’t have been as bright as those halcyon days of yore, it would have been full and rich with the breathlessness of a love more sacred and holy than even the gods humans worshiped.

How do you tell him that he was all that you could think of, no matter how much you wished you could stop? But memory was a vindictive thing that dug in its claws and dragged you endlessly back to the cliff where you watched everything you’d ever loved fall. 

It was so easy to be consumed by it, to remember, even when you wished you wouldn’t. 

But it was all you had left of him—memory, and the torn, jagged edges of a leather glove, which bore the only mark of his love.

“Yeah,” Dante finally whispers, his voice fraught with grief as it wells up inside of him with a brutal, unforgiving punch to the lungs. “You were the only thing I could ever think about.” 

Vergil feels it in his own body, the anguish that suddenly suffuses his brother. He realizes that all these years, even separated by worlds, their suffering has only been mirrored and magnified through their twin bond, and the resonant blood they share. There is a sacred and comforting intimacy in that knowledge, dark as it is.

The depth of this kind of pain is unfathomable. His brother is the only one on earth who will ever know it, and there is an intimacy in that, as well.

But there is a worse pain. That of seeing it in Dante’s eyes, hearing it in his breaking voice. Of looking at his brother like this, now on his knees and broken, instead of on his knees in willing supplication. He cannot stand the sight very long.

“Come here,” Vergil intones. “Come to me.”

Dante looks up at his brother and sees something soft and tender shining in his eyes. It’s almost enough to break him, this kindness he doesn’t deserve. This kindness that Vergil gives him, as his breath shudders out and he leans forward, wrapping his arms around his brother’s waist. His cheek presses against Vergil’s stomach as his arms tighten with quiet desperation. 

Even now, with his brother in his arms, the scent of him in his nose, Dante still feels the shadow of his loss that he’d carried all those long years. 

His fingers twist into the fabric of Vergil’s vest.

He really hadn’t meant to fuck this up all over again, but it’s like he just can’t seem to get anything right today.

Vergil wends his hands into his brother’s hair and holds him close, fingers slowly stroking. The warm weight of Dante’s body is welcome, as is the weight of his grief. There is a hollow place in them both, and that resonates, too—echoes of their estrangement.

He stares over his brother’s head, into the middle distance. “Dante,” he says, finally. “This is going to happen from time to time.” He frowns, holding his brother’s head firmly against his abdomen. “Maybe every time.”

It’s not the first time Dante has broken down in an intimate moment. Every gesture and expression of their love is loaded, heavy with implication and meaning, forever informed by the merciless past.

“It hasn’t even been a week.” He feels Dante’s occasional shuddering breaths, but the rise and fall of his shoulders is steady and strong. “This is part of our bond, that we can mourn each other so deeply. Part of our strength. It’s a gift. It’s part of what kept me alive, when I had no reason to be. Knowing you would come for me.”

“But I didn’t,” Dante whispers, his voice strained. And there it is—the weight of sorrow, his greatest regret, ringing itself around his neck. “I should’ve—” His breath hitches, verging on the edge of a dry sob. “I should’ve come for you. I should’ve done a whole lot of things differently.” _I never should have let you fall_ hovers unspoken between them, in the space between their bodies; in the unseen scars they both bear underneath their skin. In the way Dante clutches at his brother, as though they’re twenty-four years younger, standing again on that cliff. 

Maybe if he had reached for Vergil like this that day, with love instead of with violence, he could’ve stopped the fall. 

Or maybe he could’ve fallen with him. 

The alternative was far worse. 

Dante had lived it, if you can even call it a life at all.

He should have known that Vergil would’ve survived the fall. Should’ve chased him all the way to hell, and dragged him out, before Mundus had the chance to break him. 

He should have found a way to save him, but instead he shattered him to pieces. 

“You never forgot me,” Vergil whispers. “And you never gave up the hope that I still lived, brother.”

It is not easy for him to think of Dante’s life, alone, without him. He sees the vestiges of it everywhere in this place, even now that he is here, where his very presence changes the dynamic of it, strikes a new tone in each of the rooms. His brother suffered. He hates that he is pleased by this, on some level, but there is a selfish part of him that needs this evidence, confirmation that Dante’s devotion is as deep and deathless as his own.

“And you did come for me, in the end, even if you didn’t realize it. You ran toward me, even in that lamentable form. Even as you didn’t recognize that part of me was already by your side.”

He cradles his brother’s head in his arms, leaning down to murmur the words near him, losing them in his silvery hair. “Don’t you think we’ve both suffered enough for our youthful folly? Me, half-dead in hell, and you, half-dead in the mortal world? I hold no resentments, brother, that are stronger than this bliss I feel, merely being near you.”

Dante wishes those words could bring him joy, as they should. Maybe they would’ve, twenty-four years ago. He doesn’t have it in him to tell his brother that he’s wrong—he _did_ give up on him, when he never should have. And that is a regret he’ll have to live with; one he doubts he’ll ever be able to forgive himself for, even if Vergil has already given him forgiveness he doesn’t feel like he’s earned. 

His eyes burn as much as his chest, but he knows it would upset his brother to see it, even more than he already has. Shit, he really has been a fucking wreck—screwing up the day so royally. Not even being able to properly get the atonement part right. At the very least, he can find some way to do what he’s had a whole lot of practice doing and swallow down the ache. Bury it somewhere deep, and hope Vergil doesn’t accidentally say something again that’ll drag it right back out into the blinding light of day when he least expects it.

Dante turns his face so that his eyes press against the cool surface of Vergil’s vest, hiding the residual remnants of his grief. 

“Yeah,” he says thickly, his voice muffled. “Guess you’re right.” He turns his head again, cheek pressing against his brother’s abdomen once he’s confident that he’s not going to just break down again. His brother’s face is hovered close to him. He can feel Vergil’s breath in his hair. He lifts his head up and their noses brush, their mouths but a mere breath away from a kiss. Dante unwinds an arm and reaches up to touch his brother’s face, taking it gently in his hand. 

“I probably should get back to atoning, huh?” His voice a little rough, yet dulcet in its delivery as his thumb tenderly strokes over the high cliff of his brother’s cheek. 

Vergil’s eyes narrow. “Kiss me a little bit first, why don’t you.”

He is not so foolish as to believe his words are enough of a balm to soothe whatever tempest wracks his brother’s innermost thoughts, but actions have always spoken loudest to Dante, in any case. Perhaps it’s a mercy to let him drown his ruinous thoughts of things he cannot change or control in acts that he can; mindless physical expression.

There is something desperate and sentimental in his gaze as he looks at Vergil, as he speaks softly of atonement. Vergil had suggested it wryly enough, but in Dante’s eyes his desire is plain—and there is meaning there beyond lip service. Where words might fail, perhaps action will assuage.

“After that, if you wish to kneel, I will not stop you, brother.”

Their mouths come together in a soft, almost tentative kiss as Dante lifts his chin and gently closes the distance between them. It’s slow, the way it begins, so unlike the ravenous devouring that had once defined their youth. Dante takes his time savoring the feeling of his brother’s mouth against his own—the suppleness of his lips, the way he tastes. He doesn’t rush into this the way he once did, wanting to carve the memory into the deepest recesses of him so that it’ll stay bright and vivid and burn forever; so that it’ll never fade. 

He breathes out a slow breath into the kiss as it scales hotter, more sensual in degrees, moaning softly into his brother’s mouth as their tongues slick together and Vergil’s hand makes it into his hair, his nails scraping along his scalp at the base. It sends a pulse of heat through in him a slow crescendo, and when Vergil’s fingers tighten in his hair he gasps softly with it. 

His other hand slides back from his brother’s waist, traipsing over his thigh in a tender slide of his fingertips as he revels in the kiss. 

This certainly isn’t a panacea, but it’s close. 

“There you go,” whispers Vergil, breaking the kiss just enough to speak. 

He’s hard again, just like that. Whereas Dante’s passion seems to thrive on the rough, unbridled gestures, Vergil is able to detach from those with ease, while still thoroughly enjoying every moment. It is these studied and mindful intimacies that undo him completely. If he has an Achilles’ heel, then his brother’s kiss is it.

He grasps Dante’s hand and guides it over his cock. “See?” he breathes. “I’m resurrected.”

Dante’s own arousal blossoms in response, filling out as he leans in for another kiss, slowly squeezing his brother’s length through his pants. He hums softly, his tongue slicking sensually along the seam of his brother’s mouth, as his thumb traces the hard ridge of Vergil’s cock all the way up to the swell of the tip. 

In his youth, he might’ve said something particularly filthy at a moment like this. Something that would’ve flared the heat in his brother’s blood. Something that would’ve been dripping with his particular brand of unapologetic brashness. But now, all he wants is to wrap his mouth around his brother, instead of around a snappy line. 

His fingers slide up and he undoes Vergil’s belt as his eyes flick up to gaze upon his brother’s beautiful face, drinking him in. It’s going to take a while to get used to this—being able to look up at him again, to have him looking back at him. 

To have Vergil close enough to touch, to be able to feel his brother hard and wanting underneath his hand—sometimes Dante wonders if this is really just a dream. 

If it is, he hopes he never has to wake up.

He undoes the fastenings of his brother’s pants and reaches in, gazing up at him as he wraps his fingers around his cock and pulls him out, his brother’s familiar, primal scent filling up his nose, immediately making his mouth water with anticipation. Vergil’s cock gives a pulse in his grip, hardening more as it fills out and swells with blood. Dante gives a languid stroke, relishing the velvety feel of his brother’s foreskin as it slides down over solid heat, revealing the reddening head. 

He wastes no time dipping his head down, eyelids dropping to half-mast as he slowly lets his tongue lap out, encircling the head of Vergil’s cock in a sensual stroke that has his mouth flooding with his brother’s raw flavor. Just being able to taste him like this, to have his tongue dripping down his length, is enough to make the desire in Dante grow into a roar, as he moans softly in quiet appreciation, that Vergil’s allowing him to do this after how badly he’d fucked up. 

“You are sorry, aren’t you?” Vergil’s words are sounded softly, almost on a held breath. His brother’s slow, torturous attentions are almost unbearably arousing. “I can feel it.”

He shifts languorously, easing down, sinking deeper into the couch, widening the set of his thighs to accommodate his brother’s broad shoulders. There is something stirring about the sight of Dante’s nakedness, caged by his own black-clad thighs and booted calves.

He reaches for his brother’s face, touches his mouth with idle fingertips as Dante’s lips and tongue caress his cock. He catches fragments of Dante’s musk, as it mingles with his own. Together, they have a heady chemistry that makes him shudder.

“Show me your remorse, brother.”

Dante knows he’ll never fully be able to atone for the past. 

But in this moment, Vergil is giving him a mercy, allowing him to worship at his altar, to kneel before him and pay penance with his mouth. He kneels before his brother and offers up a prayer with his tongue slicking its way down the throbbing length of Vergil’s cock, groaning softly as the velvet heat drags along his tongue. His mouth is fervent in this most carnal act of contrition—and soon, Vergil’s cock is glistening with saliva, as Dante works the entire length from root to tip. 

He can feel the heat of his brother’s watchful eyes as he gazes down upon him, can feel it burning into him as he parts his lips and suckles on the tip, moaning as he’s rewarded with the dark, salty taste of his brother flooding across his tongue. His own arousal has grown unabashedly full and erect, and the wonderful, sharp taste of Vergil is enough to make thick, clear emanations of desire drool from the tip. 

This act of penance is not one he rushes into; he takes his time savoring every moment of it, making love to his brother with his mouth, with his tongue, with his breath that catches in his throat as he parts his lips to take him in, achingly slow and sensual. 

Vergil lets his head fall back against the couch with a low sound that hovers halfway between between a sigh and a groan. His fingers find Dante’s hair and thread idly in among the strands there. There is no rough urging in his touch, only a reverent tenderness.

He feels a slow building of heat in his cock and balls, a nuclear warming; the kind of slow and cataclysmic disaster that will wipe a nation off the map. The tension that redoubles in his loins is deceptively docile at first, surging exponentially with each zealous plunge of Dante’s shaggy head.

Vergil gazes down at Dante with half-veiled lids and a faint smile. He is unselfconscious about this act; about accepting it, about watching Dante perform it, and it seems the more hedonic he is about it, the more it spurs his brother on.

He bends his knee and draws his boot up on the couch, letting himself sprawl a little more obscenely, as he toys with his brother’s hair and steeps in the all-encompassing heat of his mouth. 

“Are you as hard as I am, brother?” He laughs, then. “What am I saying? Of course you are.” Dante doesn’t reply except to raise his eyes, feverish in pale blue, ravenous in their depths. He is exquisite, even now. Vergil feels himself soften toward his brother, warming around the edges. “That’s enough atonement, I think.”

He gently grasps Dante’s hair and eases his head back, releasing his cock by inches to the relative coolness of the evening. It is rigid as a menhir and throbs unmercifully. “Look what you’ve done, brother.”

Dante’s breath is a little ragged as he’s pulled off his brother’s cock, tempted to complain immediately about the fact that he was really starting to enjoy it. But this isn’t about him at all—he’s reminded of that fact when he looks up at Vergil, who sits sprawled across the couch like a god cut out of marble, his cock glistening obscenely. 

Dante would very much like nothing more than to get that right back in his mouth so he can properly worship it like Vergil deserves, but apparently, his brother has other plans for him.

He lets his gaze wander down to Vergil’s cock, then flicks his eyes back up to his brother, and dares to let the corners of his mouth tilt up slightly. “I dunno, Verge, it’s looking pretty good to me, from where I’m… kneeling,” he quips.

Vergil feels a faint smile tint his lips. “Do you remember that night, all those years ago, when I found you with that human in the alley?”

He shifts forward, reaching down with brotherly impunity to grasp Dante’s stiff, slick cock, which has really outdone itself this time. It feels like steel under hot satin, scarcely yielding to the press of his fingers. It jumps under his touch, along with Dante’s breath which comes trembling out of him as his hips instinctively rock forward. 

“I took you back here, and I took you by this—” He gives Dante’s prick a squeeze, and feels it flex again. “And dragged you to that billiard table over there. I had plans for you, brother. But they ended up going slightly awry.”

He strokes his hand from shaft to tip, once, with a firm, possessive grip, letting his palm circle the glans, smearing slickness over the soft flesh as his fingertips tease the frenulum. Dante moans, his head lolling forward as his hips twitch up slightly. 

“Do you remember?”

“Yeah,” Dante gasps out as his brother’s fingers expertly dance over his cock, playing him like an instrument that was molded just for his touch. “Pretty hard to forget that night.” 

He remembers it far too clearly—the depths of his surrender. How glorious it had been.

It had been one of the brightest, happiest moments of his life—the night that he touched heaven in his brother’s arms. The night he fell endlessly into the ocean that was Vergil; letting himself be dragged right under, opening his mouth to drown on him. Filling up his body with him. 

He had felt so alive and full of love, burning with an insatiable hunger for his brother. 

That had been so long ago. 

Vergil’s fingers give a slow stroke, and Dante moans as he spills out over his brother’s fingers, clear and thick and copious. “Surprised you still—” he groans, as his breath goes ragged, eyes glazing over with heat and desire, when Vergil’s thumb swipes over the glossy head of his cock “—remember.” 

“My memories have all but returned,” says Vergil. There is a pang as he says it, but he does not betray this. “And that night was indeed memorable. I would not exchange it for anything. Yet if we speak of regrets, I suppose that’s one. My plans mislaid.”

He continues to stroke his brother, fingers playing in the viscous fluid of Dante’s arousal. As responses go, it is enthusiastic and unsubtle, much like him.

He offers a faint, sly smile and eases closer, kissing the side of Dante’s neck, sensuously idle.

“Though it’s not the first time you’ve spoiled my plans, is it?”

“Seems I got more atoning to do than I thought….” Dante groans as Vergil’s fingers glide sensually over his glans, his cock pulsing in his brother’s fingers. He finds himself panting as he cants his head to allow Vergil more access to him, his pulse surging underneath his brother’s soft lips. His hand slides up into Vergil’s hair as his brother’s breath whispers across his skin, sending a rush of heat with it through his body.

Vergil breathes out. Dante’s hand his hair is giving him chills. It is bittersweet to remember dreaming of his brother’s touch in the netherworld, trying to conjure the memory of Dante’s arms around him.

Vergil’s lips graze the shell of Dante’s ear. “Shall we pick up where we left off all those years ago, brother? With a gentlemanly game of billiards?”

“Gentlemanly, huh?” Dante murmurs, his breath catching slightly as Vergil’s fingers twist down his length in the most delicious way. “Just what do you have in mind?” 

In response, Vergil only leads him toward the pool table. Dante offers no resistance; in fact, he follows all too willingly. “You were like this,” Vergil says, pushing him back against it with a slow smile. “Yes. Just like this.”

Dante remembers it differently. He remembers having turned for his brother. Remembers the solid weight of Vergil’s hand brushing down the entire length of his spine—a strong, steady anchor. Remembers, too, what came after—how full of love he’d felt from it. How happy he was. 

But if this is what Vergil wants to remember, then Dante will go right along with it, not wanting to risk seeing that rare smile on his brother’s face fade for any reason. He grins and leans against the table as directed, canting his hip suggestively, raising his chin slightly to elongate his neck. 

“Perfect,” Vergil murmurs, looking him up and down with blatant appreciation. “Even more so now than then.” It’s true. His brother’s nude body is thewy and strapping, his grin is cocky and alluring. Dante has changed, but he’s never been more glorious to Vergil.

“On the table,” is all he can say in the moment, low-throated. Holding his brother’s eyes, he begins to unfasten his vest. “Hands and knees.”

Dante can’t help but quirk a brow slightly, mouth curving with a lopsided smile. “What happened to that _gentlemanly_ game of billiards, huh?” he teases rhetorically, even as he follows through, drawing himself up onto the table, muscles rippling as he moves. He lets the sinuous lines of his body turn into something quite sensual as he flows into the position his brother had decreed, crawling a few feet down the table to let Vergil appreciate his backside properly. He arches the small of his back and spreads his legs, then glances over his shoulder at his brother. 

It’s a dark, sultry look, filled with longing and a quiet hunger.

Dante knows the vision he’s created—the perfect picture of willing submission. 

His cock hangs straight down betweens his legs, heavy and slick with arousal. 

“Is this what you had in mind, brother?” It’s practically a purr, the way it’s delivered.

Now stripped to the waist, Vergil throws his vest aside and appraises the tableau his brother has presented him with. He slows, strolling around the table, taking it in from all angles.

“Oh yes,” he intones, sonorously. “This is good.”

He pauses for a moment to appreciate Dante in all his wanton, exhibitionist splendor. A beat later, he gracefully vaults the table himself. “Are you truly my demon brother?” he murmurs. “Or are you an angel?”

He reaches out to run a hand down his brother’s enviable body; down his back, over the curve of his smooth, taut buttock.

“And I wept both night and day,  
And he wiped my tears away;  
And I wept both day and night,  
And hid from him my heart’s delight.

So he took his wings, and fled;  
Then the morn blushed rosy red.  
I dried my tears, and armed my fears  
With ten thousand shields and spears.

Soon my Angel came again;  
I was armed, he came in vain;  
For the time of youth was fled,” Vergil whispers.  
“And grey hairs were on my head.”

But grey is not white-silver, and they both know it.

Dante quietly shudders under the solid weight of his brother’s hand, arching into his touch as Vergil’s fingers run over the curve of his ass and down to his thigh, then back up again. His brother’s voice is like the velvet crush of night—an endless, dark sky with the heat of shared passion that lights up all the stars.

Dante really doesn’t know how Vergil manages to make poetry sound so fucking sexy, but somehow he does. It’s almost criminal, how absurdly erotic he makes it. Foreplay in the form of words. 

But there’s something about this particular poem. _I was armed, he came in vain_ his brother said. 

Dante might not be all that erudite, but for once, he had actually been listening—and even he understands the implication of those words.

He rolls back to sit on his heels and turns his head to face Vergil, then leans back to close the distance between them. His fingers drag down the perfect chiseled slope of his brother’s jaw. “Disarm yourself, brother,” he murmurs softly, recalling a particular poem that had struck a chord in him. One he’d read countless times in Vergil’s absence. “ _You are not at war. Slow down, breathe deep, drop your guard. No one is chasing you, but me._ ”

On his knees behind his brother, Vergil breathes out in a long, slow shudder that terminates in a sudden kiss. His arm slips around Dante’s chest and seizes tight, fingers gripping into the hard plane of his pectoral, and its all-too-human warmth. 

Vergil is aware of their posture; the erotic classicalism of it, with even the pool table as plinth. Dante is the aching, languishing one, arched back into his embrace, returning his kiss a thousandfold and more.

“Where did you come by that,” he whispers against his brother’s mouth.

“It was written on a wall in an alley,” Dante murmurs back, his voice as quiet and as soft as the way his fingers trace the contours of his brother’s face. “I came across it a long, long time ago.”

He must’ve been twenty-two or twenty-three at the time, and Vergil’s loss was still fresh. His memory hadn’t yet grown faded around the edges, weathered with the relentless march of time. 

Dante had chased a demon down an alley and eviscerated it successfully, blood splattering all over his face, his clothes, drenching his hair. It gave him no rush of excitement, no thrill. It was a kill as empty and as meaningless as everything else in his life, and he’d turned to walk back the way he’d come—only for his eye to catch a particularly large piece of wall art that had been illuminated by the pale light of the moon. He was reading what was written there before he had the chance to brace himself against it—a grief so deep and dark it nearly swallowed him. 

He sat down hard, staring at the words, burning them into himself.

Vergil would have loved this, he thought. But Vergil no longer walked the earth, and he knew the words would never reach him. 

He memorized them, anyway. Carried them with him and wrote them down so that he’d never lose them. He never thought the day would come that he’d be able to speak these words aloud to his brother. But here they are now, and Vergil seems as moved by them as Dante had been, all those years ago. 

“I never thought I’d be able to say this to you,” Dante admits, looking deep into the eyes that he’d longed to see looking back at him for a lifetime. “I probably said them a thousand times in my dreams, but you were never here before to hear them.” His fingers slip into his brother’s hair gently, pushing back the pale strands before sliding back down to caress his jaw. “It’s just the kind of corny shit that you like so much,” he continues with a soft, wry smile. 

“It goes like this: I do not love you for your strength and grit, for your set jaw, for the harsh cartography of your knuckled fist,” Dante says as his fingertips brush over the apex of his brother’s chin, then drop down to where his hand is splayed over his chest, running his fingers over Vergil’s hand. “I do not love you for your sharp corners. I rub your tensed wrist like a pliant mouth,” he murmurs, as he wraps his fingers slowly around his brother’s wrist, letting them drag down the tender throat of it, “I wait for spread fingers and vulnerable palm: a hollow nest to dream in.”

Dante pauses for a breath, his eyes holding his brother as his hand traverses the distance back up to his face, this time to brush sensually over Vergil’s mouth. “I want the hurt you soothe like an ulcer in your mouth, your night terror, your raw-eyed vulnerability: these unarmored parts which are mine alone.” Dante leans in for a soft kiss, his tongue flickering out to dance over his brother’s lips, and then he whispers again, right against Vergil’s mouth, “Darling, you are not at war. Slow down, breathe deep, drop your guard. No one is chasing you but me.” 

Vergil closes his eyes against the quiet rush of feeling that subsumes him; an upswell from the veiled depths of his soul at the rarity of this unexpected gift. It is strange to hear his rough brother recite anything; strange to know he has carried these words within him all this time.

“Yet you do love all those things in me.” He knows part of this poem is a poetic lie. But such hyperbolic language is allowed within the confines of verse, if in the service of emotion, and within the bounds of good taste. “As I love them in you.”

And he does love exactly that about Dante; all that and more. It would be impossible, he thinks, to number them. They tally among stars, and grains of sand. Even these unguarded moments when his brother proves surprising, even startling, with his heart worn open, pinned on his bloodstained sleeve.

He strokes his palm over Dante’s chest, and up the column of his throat to hold him there gently.

Turning his face against his brother’s ear, he murmurs low words. “Such a rare act of love from your tongue, brother. And now perhaps, in turn, one from mine.”

He pulls back to grasp Dante by his powerful shoulders, running his hands inward from the domes of them with slow and reverent firmness, across, up his neck and down his back—pushing Dante forward onto his hands once more as he leans in, tracing a searing line down his brother’s spine on the point of his tongue. 

In the succulent dip of Dante’s sacroiliac, he pauses only to press a lingering kiss in the vaunted hollow, then resumes his ultimate, indecent path, straight through the cleft that bisects the globes of his brother’s embonpoint and praiseworthy ass, his tongue alighting gently on the soft and cryptic furrow, the trembling gate that leads to the deepest part of him. It’s the one demonic portal his brother will always beg him to breach, he thinks, amused at the irony.

The cry that cuts through the air is a sharp crack of shocked pleasure.

Dante had almost forgotten just how intense and glorious this obscene pleasure can be; it’s been over twenty years since the last time Vergil’s kissed him this lewdly, made love to him with his tongue. He’s never let another person claim this intimacy; this act of love which solely belongs to his brother, one he would never surrender to anyone else. It doesn’t take much for Vergil to rock the foundations of Dante’s earth, cracking apart his faultlines with slow, tender swipes of tongue around the most intimate part of him that twitches under his ministrations. 

The quake starts somewhere deep—a low pulsing that radiates out, quivering down his spread thighs and his arms, all the way down to his fingers.

“ _Fuuuuck…_ ” he groans as his brother’s tongue teases slowly, lighting up all his nerves with white hot electric stabs of pleasure that has Dante shaking as he tries his best to hold himself still. Vergil’s fingers hold him firmly in place to ensure that he doesn’t accidentally buck away. “Oh fuck, Verge…” he half-gasps, half-pants out, a keening whine forming at the back of his throat as he bows his head. 

His cock pulses in synchronicity with each swipe of the tongue, a hot, thick gush of slick dripping from the tip and splattering on the green felt below.

Vergil is pleased, indeed, at the earth-shattering cry that rattles the heavens along with his blood, at the parabolic ecstasy of his brother’s broad back arching into the ravenous press of his mouth. At Dante’s spontaneous litany of profanities, interspersed with the intimate sobriquet of his apocopated name. All of this pleases him, and pleases him deeply.

Dante is magnificent on his hands and knees, gasping and straining in the madness of lust, every muscle in evidence. He well loves his brother’s humanity, in this moment, for its animal beauty. The heavy scent of his arousal is pure male animal, as well, an intoxicant Vergil recalls with staggering memory as it surrounds him, invading his senses.

His hands shift from holding his brother’s callipygian ass to spreading it wide, as he thrusts his tongue deep into the spit-slicked, wanting orifice, pressing his face into earthy musk and clean sweat; dark and rich and clandestine. He does this for relentless iterations, twisting and undulating, seeking new expressions of passionate obscenity. 

Dante’s cries fill the air around them, a concupiscent soundtrack filled with raw, primal need. His breath comes out of him in hot, ragged pants as he rides his brother’s devilish tongue, which stokes the fire inside him to a maddening conflagration of wild, unbridled lust. It doesn’t take long before he’s unable to hold himself up, and he crashes down onto his forearms, driving his ass up even higher—all the better for his brother’s ravenous mouth.

Vergil is relentlessly brutal, with how he _consumes_ him, feasting upon his twitching, hungry flesh with a furious intensity that has Dante desperately wanton and needy.

“Shit— Vergil, that’s so fucking good,” he groans out, as his brother slicks his tongue back inside him, a sheen of sweat breaking out over his arousal-flushed skin. 

Vergil pulls back to catch his breath for a moment, reaching around to grasp Dante’s cock, the infallible barometer of his success. He finds it effluent, thick and flushed with blood and heat. Behind it, his brother’s balls are taut and succulent as passionfruit in a chiaroscuro painting. He nuzzles them impulsively, inhaling their heady cologne. 

Dante makes a sound that falls somewhere between a whine and a moan as his cock pulses in Vergil’s hand, a clear web of glistening gossamer strands oozing profusely from the tip and pooling onto the felt beneath him. His hips twitch slightly as resists the urge to fuck his brother’s hand. 

“Shall I lave all others from your temple, my brother?” Vergil whispers. “Strike your other lovers from existence and reclaim all our sundered years?”

 _Yes_ , is all Dante can think, even through the thick fog of desire, all of him wanting nothing more than for Vergil to burn away all traces of ersatz lovers through their long years apart. To reclaim every inch of Dante’s body with himself. He wants nothing more than to revel in the all-encompassing surety of his brother’s claim; to feel the mark of Vergil’s ownership indelibly branded deep within. 

“Go ahead,” he breathes out, his voice as rough as gravel. “Take what’s yours.” 

_Make me forget I ever lost you at all_ , he desperately thinks to himself.

It sends a cool, silent thrill through Vergil—the words, and the lustful, resigned way Dante says them; like they’re rolled in grit and honey.

“Mine, you say. Mine alone. And yet you gave it away the moment I left, brother. Just like the Yamato.” He rises to his knees, and reaches to the side, smoothly summoning the eponymous blade to his hand, feeling his fist close around her leather-wrapped hilt. “Tell me, Dante: how many men have done as I just did? Given you a tongue-lashing that left you weak and broken, begging to be taken? How many others have you said ‘I’m yours’ to?”

Vergil gazes down at his brother’s artfully carved back, admiring its supple and undulating contour, propped as he is on forearms and knees.

Like this, Vergil can’t see his brother’s face. Dante is all too grateful for it. 

The position hides the sudden burst of grief that had stricken his expression in a brutal flash of lightning carving across his sky. It draws his brows together, steals his breath. Breaks open the ache in his chest. _You didn’t just leave,_ he thinks despairingly. _You died._

His fingers curl into tight fists, and Dante takes a bracing breath, reeling from the unintended blow Vergil surely hadn’t meant to deliver. 

He knows that his brother only wants to hear him speak his devotion out loud; that he wants to know that Dante only belongs to him, and no one else. That there is no one on this earth or below who could ever compare; who could ever satisfy Dante the way only Vergil can. 

He knows it fills Vergil with joy and love beyond compare to hear him say those sacred words, as much as it fills Dante in return. 

There’s a quiet shake in his breath. Dante’s shoulders tense. He swallows hard around the rock that had made its way into his throat.

“Vergil,” he says, his voice a quiet whisper. “You’re the only one who’s ever done this. I’ve never given this to anyone else.” Vergil had been the first, and the last. This part of him belonged only to him, and Dante never would surrender this precious intimacy to anyone but his brother. “I’ve also never said those words to anyone but you.” 

He doesn’t know how Vergil could even think it; that Dante would perform such sacrilege. Those words are holy sacrament; he could never imagine serving such divine purpose for anyone else.

“I only belong to you,” he says quietly, his breath shaking, despite his valiant attempt to keep it steady. “No one else.”

Vergil is struck wordless, for a moment—uncharacteristically so, though he allows this is largely imperceptible; sustained silence is not unusual for him.

He had never imagined Dante might hold any part of his corpus sacred or impenetrable, inviolable. His brother had been penetrated from every angle possible, ripped and sliced and run through. It has never seemed to concern him, or even “slow his roll,” to borrow a phrase from the man himself.

But gazing down at his strong, trembling form, Vergil feels a slim, piercing pain, like someone has slipped a chiv between his ribs. 

It is something; something staggering to know he is the only one who has ever trespassed here, in these sacrosanct pastures; that Dante has held himself apart with such ascetic restraint, denied himself these most base and sacred pleasures—even believing him dead.

Vergil feels himself crippled, briefly, by the beating black wings of unasked-for emotion, and he closes his eyes. It is almost a flinch. His brother’s pain sings louder in his senses, however; more raw and unvarnished, more anguished. It steals primacy, always, from his own, which recedes in its wake.

He falls forward over his brother, pressing his brow to Dante’s suffering back with final, gentle gravity. He does not need to see his brother’s too-expressive face to know; Dante suffers eloquently, with every ounce and iota of his being.

“And I to you,” he utters, gutturally. “As ever.”

He wonders, sometimes, if his brother truly understands how bilateral their bond is, how it subsumes them both to one another in different ways, and they serve each other, always.

“May I take you, brother? Will you have me?”

The question settles somewhere below Dante’s ribs; a warm flame that flickers brightly and illuminates him from within. His heart is suddenly wonderfully full, and his breath catches lightly in his throat at the question. 

Vergil never needs to ask to take what already belongs to him; that he does at all, that he places such tremendous power in Dante’s hands—the power of refusal—is an incredible privilege, especially when Vergil has never been one to hesitate when it comes to claiming his deepest desires. He was ready to start a war, all in the name of power. 

But here he is, readily surrendering it to his little brother.

“As I said before,” Dante breathes out softly, “ _take what’s yours._ ”

Vergil nods, slowly rising from his brother’s back, gliding his palm lovingly down the artful frieze of muscles as he does, as if sculpting him anew. “Then you will take what’s mine,” he vows, imbuing the words with sensual menace. Yamato is still in his hand, and he swiftly regrips it, reversing his grasp on the crossguard so that the hilt points upward; long and rigid, ito wrapped and lacquered.

His palm squeezes Dante’s ass, once, savoring its taut succulence, before spreading him once more. He touches the end of the hilt to the sensitive entry. The metal of the graven menuki is cold, and Dante’s back arches as it glances the tender flesh, hips slightly flinching forward. He inhales a sharp breath as every muscle in his body tenses briefly in surprise, before slowly relaxing in acceptance. 

“How many times have I thrust this sword into you, brother?”

A tremble goes through Dante’s entire frame. 

“Hard to say. More times than I can count.” 

His heart pounds up against his ribs in quiet anticipation as he tries to keep himself still. He knows Yamato’s blade intimately—every solid inch of it. He’s felt it deep inside of him, has had it split through him countless times. Yet, he’s never been penetrated quite so obscenely. 

It’s shocking that his brother would ever think of using Yamato in such a filthy way. 

Not even Dante would’ve imagined this in his wildest fantasies. 

Yet, he can’t help but find himself hopelessly aroused by the thought of Vergil fucking him with the hilt of a sword that has cut him down so many times in the past. There’s something awfully poetic about it—the thought that his brother intends to penetrate him with love, instead of with violence. 

“Do you still keep gun oil in your desk drawer, brother?” Vergil leans into the hilt slightly, letting Dante feel the blunt and toying pressure, whispering its intent, flirting with the space beyond, making Dante’s breath quicken.

“Gun oil,” Dante repeats, and then huffs a breath of amusement as he turns his head back to glance at his brother with a slightly quirked brow. “Of course, brother,” he drawls with an indolent grin. “What do you take me for?”

“I’ll be right back,” Vergil says, lightly, and Dante’s hip vanishes from beneath his hand as he teleports.

“Dammit, I fucking hate it when you do that,” Dante groans, already missing his brother’s touch. 

“Already back, brother,” Vergil murmurs, amused. He has little use for Dante’s guns, it’s true, but plenty of use for their accoutrements. He remembers using precisely this cached item for a long, hot, slow fuck on Dante’s desk, among other things. He squeezes it into his palm and slicks the hilt, generously, then adds a little more. No need to be uncivilized.

Then he reaches down, notches it into place once more, letting Dante feel its imminent incursion. Letting him anticipate the feeling of being filled by the rigid, uncompromising length of his second-most well-loved weapon, the one that was never far from his loving hand.

Vergil’s voice is low and louche. “Shall I open the portal?”

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	2. Chapter 2

There’s a part of Dante that’s almost incredulous. 

Of all the things Vergil could have said, of course he decides to refer to Dante’s asshole as a _portal_. Dante rolls his eyes. It’s actually not a bad line, all things considered, but his cock is desperately hard and dripping and he needs to feel _something_ inside of him, even if it’s the hilt of his brother’s beloved sword. 

“Fuck, just do it already,” he groans. 

In response, Vergil gives Yamato a minimal, brutal, effective gesture, the well-slicked hilt breaching Dante’s body abruptly. It sends a devastating wave of searing heat ruthlessly screaming through his insides, the shock of it so immediate, so visceral, it immediately arrests his breath like fingers squeezing around his lungs; a thunderbolt straight to his core.

“Oh _fuuuuck…_ ” Dante whispers, his breath ragged as he gasps, chest heaving, thighs shaking, every nerve on _fire_. It hurts so fucking good that it’d nearly taken his vision with it, as his body protests around the intrusion, convulsing violently around what fills him, desperately trying to heal from the evisceration. He can feel every inch of his brother’s weapon where it presses into raw flesh—the ridges and grooves of the lacing; the cold, unfeeling metal of the engraved tip. 

Of all the ways he could have possibly been penetrated by Yamato, this sure as hell takes the cake.

“You’re so dramatic,” drawls Vergil. 

He caresses Dante’s lower back and buttocks as he begins to move the haft, slowly, in and out, establishing a deep, lulling rhythm. Yamato responds to his blood, and thirsts for his brother’s; he can feel her vibrate in his grip as his power animates her.

“I think she likes you,” he murmurs.

“Yeah?” Dante groans as he’s split apart by the hilt of his brother’s sword, panting for breath as the heat coalesces inside of him and bursts with a flash of pleasure, when the laced ridges slowly drag through the molten heat inside him. Tendrils of it blossom outwards. His cock jerks in response.

Power thrums deep within him—a low, steady pulse that whispers to the demon crouching in the shadows.

“You know… I’m not usually into being fucked by your sword, brother,” he drawls, sucking in a low breath as Yamato languidly slides back out of him, the glide deliciously slow, blood and oil easing the passage to something increasingly pleasurable. “But this— _hnngh!—_ this...I like.” 

“But now I’m jealous of _her_ ,” whispers Vergil, gazing at the obscene tableau, a quiet, simmering hunger informing the pale, deceptive calm of his narrowed eyes.

It is a gesture, a symbol, and something of a promise on his part, this penetration by proxy. A reversal of arms; a vow to Dante that he will never find Vergil holding him at sword’s length again. He finds it fitting that this instrument, which has only ever brought Dante pain in his hands, should now bring him only pleasure.

“Ready yourself for me, little brother.” Vergil’s palm eases mindlessly over Dante’s taut and trembling flank, and his eyes slip to half mast, as he sends another surge of power through the sword, watching his brother’s magnificent body respond to her reverberations. “Show me your motivation.”

“ _Really,_ Verge?” Dante rasps out, nearly exasperated. “Your damn sword is up my ass! That ain’t enough motivation for ya?” In response, Yamato gives a low purr that sends raw, electric power searing through his blood, awakening the darkest, most primal part of him, pushing out a low, hungry moan. There’s an old, familiar hunger rising within him, one that he thought had forever been tempered by time and by the debilitating weight of loss.

It is relentless in its need as it re-emerges with a roar within him.

He’s nearly stunned by its power, which has all the rage of a storm.

Dante gives himself over to it, falling into it like he did over twenty years ago, head bowing as his mouth falls open with a guttural groan, and his body soars with infernal pleasure that he takes ravenously into himself, fucking back onto his brother’s sword, hips rolling unabashedly. 

He pushes himself up for more leverage, arching his back as he rides the Yamato like it’s his brother’s cock, eyes slitting with lust as he fucks himself on the slippery length. 

His cock sways beneath him with each thrust, dripping obscenely onto the table below. 

Really, he should be a little pissed off about all of this, but he’s too far gone to care. 

He looks back over his shoulder at his brother, seeking his gorgeous face. A flush of passion rides high in his cheeks, and his eyes glint with heat, as lips part with a ragged breath. “Vergil…” he moans out as he takes the hilt deeper, a cry breaking past his lips as he slams back hard on what fills him. “ _Verge—_ ” Another needy, desperate gasp, as his hips roll with increased urgency.

He may be fucking himself on the weapon his brother wields with his hand, but there’s no denying which sword he truly desires. 

Vergil’s breath is elevated, his gaze feverish as he watches. This is beauty. This is his. “You’re too much,” he murmurs, fondly, the words blurred by lust.

It isn’t true. He can never get enough of his brother, even at his worst. There is never enough.

He yanks Yamato free with a single, smooth, minimal gesture; no different than battle, and sends her away. His cock is thrumming with the same power that animated her, pulses of seismic blue sensation surging through every inch of hot, straining flesh. It is unmercifully hard and upthrust, grazing his stomach.

His hands seek Dante’s waist and slide up his back, pushing his chest down onto the table, reinforcing his pose. He doesn’t have to guide his cock, as it seeks to enter his brother—the magnetism of their blood calls him home, like Yamato to his hand.

“Yes, Dante,” he whispers. At last, an answer.

He shoves his hips forward in a single, clean, brutal strike, throwing his head back with a groan.

Dante’s cry fills the air as his brother finds his way back into him.

It’s like being caught up in the arms of a wild storm that surges through and around him, sweeping him high up into the endless sky to soar; he’s helpless against the onslaught of it, the unearthly pleasure of having his soul made whole. He can feel every inch of his brother buried deep inside of him, the currents of carnal power vibrating at a frequency that sings through every muscle and nerve. 

It makes him feel alive the only way he ever is when he’s in Vergil’s arms.

His fingers claw for a beat at the felt beneath as his hips give a hungry rock, desperate to have more, to have his brother pound him raw. 

“C’mon, Verge,” he pants out, a wild grin splitting his face. “Let’s party.”

Vergil can’t help himself. He literally laughs out loud. It feels strange; good.

He strokes Dante’s back for a moment, leaning into him. His cock is buried in his brother to the hilt, and he gives a little grind along with the weight, to drive the point home.

“I suppose a little party could be in order,” he purrs. “After all, this is a family reunion.”

Right now there is no sign of the broken, devastated man who’d cleaved to his waist and pressed his face into his vest like a child, or the jaded, cynical one who carries the weight of their lost years like an omnipresent burden. There is only Dante, in his purest form; the one he remembers. He loves them all, but it’s nice to see this one again.

“I’ve missed you,” he says, simply, before he pulls back and runs him through, then does it again, and again, and again. 

If Dante had any breath at all left in his lungs, he would have told his brother this: he’d missed him more than Vergil would ever fully know; he’d missed him as much as the sun misses the moon. He lost himself when he lost his brother, died right alongside him. There was no life or living without him, only a hollow, meaningless existence; waiting for the day when he would meet his brother again in whatever afterlife awaited. 

To have him back now, alive and breathing and full of _laughter_ and love; to feel him warm underneath his hands, to taste his kiss, and have him buried deep where he’s always belonged, is the greatest answer to a prayer he didn’t even realize he’d been offering up all along. 

He is filled with as much joy as he is with pleasure, his cries unbridled and ecstatic, wild and free in a way they haven’t been in so long. It bubbles up from deep within him like a spring finding its way up onto the surface of parched, cracked earth. 

“ _Harder,_ ” Dante demands, his body a wave flowing in perfect synchronicity with its other half, meeting Vergil when he drives forward, rocking together to the rhythm set by their hearts. 

Vergil obliges, hands gripping Dante’s hips, ruthlessly bracing, as he pounds him without remorse. Dante’s response to this onslaught is breathless laughter that breaks off in a guttural groan. It segues into a keening moan, and something about it is both heartwarming and arousing.

“You’re a little slut, aren’t you,” Vergil murmurs, on impulse. There’s nothing little about his so-called little brother, but the coarse words are warm and full of affection. “Taking your own brother’s cock like this. You sick fuck.”

He says this, even as he what he sees before him is a study in beauty. There’s no sickness about it. Only the ultimate physical expression of a star-crossed love he’s been chasing since the cradle.

After a beat, Vergil smirks faintly and pulls back his gloved hand, giving Dante a sharp smack on his taut and flexing ass. Little brother moans like a whore in response, his hips flinching with it. 

“Yeah, what can I say,” Dante manages to rasp out breathlessly, between moans, “my brother’s got a great cock. I fucking love it.” 

There’s a certain thrill in hearing such crassness come out of his brother’s beautiful mouth; his brother, who is always the picture of sophistication and perfection, who has poetry flowing off his tongue. It’s so uncharacteristically dirty, that it’s unbelievably hot, and sends a sharp wave of heat flowing straight through his body down through his cock in a hot, wet splurt of slick. 

“You know what I’d love more?” he gasps out with a cheeky grin. “If he fucked me even harder.” 

With a rebellious flare, he smoothly pushes himself up on his hands and wrests control briefly out of Vergil’s grip as he draws his hips forward, sliding to the tip, then slams back with a loud, unbridled cry as Vergil’s cock drives back deep into him. 

“Ha.” Vergil’s brow knits; he reels slightly at the impact, the unexpected sensation. “You’re a handful today.” He leans forward and grasps Dante’s shoulders, using them as leverage, and starts to fuck him in rough, brusque, brutal thrusts, keeping a punishing rhythm. The sound of their flesh colliding echoes in counterpoint to their staggered breaths. “Stay where you belong.”

“Hell yeah, just like that,” Dante moans in response. 

He’d almost forgotten just how much he’s needed this—for Vergil to take him and break him apart. For him to hold him and tell him where he belongs and brutally take what has always been his. To have the breath fucked right out of his lungs, voice gone hoarse from the rapturous cries leaving his mouth as his brother leaves the indelible mark of his ownership of him buried in the deepest part of him. Like this, all the years they had lost fade away to the dust of yesterday’s past, and all Dante can focus on is the here and now of his brother’s hands on his flesh, and his scent in his lungs, and the thickness of his cock as it ruthlessly splits him apart. He feels like he’s being molded into something new as he’s worked around his brother’s cock. 

For the first time in twenty-four years, Dante feels truly free again.

There’s a litany of love at the edge of his tongue, but it comes out in a stream of profanity-laced moans.

Vergil watches his brother’s wanton undulations. Hearing his uninhibited groans, seeing him let go like this, give himself up, succumb, surrender—it’s stunning, staggering. He almost feels bad for what he’s about to do.

Almost. Not quite.

He smacks Dante’s ass again, with a low chuckle, and teleports.

Dante lets out a frustrated groan as he loses his brother’s warmth, and finds himself suddenly, abruptly empty, his body convulsing around nothing. It’s a shock to the senses, and rips him right out of the soaring heights he had begun to ascend to. His entire body trembles as he gasps for breath. 

A part of him is almost furious enough to turn around and catch his asshole of a brother, hold him down and ride him hard and fast. He knows Vergil wouldn’t resist—that he’d even enjoy it, the ferocity of Dante’s need, the way he expresses it. 

But there’s another part of him that’s simply tired of running after his brother. 

“You bastard,” he says, with no malice, just hopeless resignation, as he slowly turns around and discovers that Vergil had teleported to the fucking refrigerator. “Seriously? Are you for real, bro?” he asks with a roll of the eyes as Vergil actually opens the fridge door. 

He knows that Vergil fully expects him to come flying off the table after him.

But two can play at this game, and if there’s anything Dante’s learned over the years, it’s that sometimes, having a flair for the dramatic can come in handy.

And if there’s anything Dante is confident about, it’s his ability to put on a show.

He levels Vergil with a withering look and sighs. “Alright... if that’s how you wanna play it, I guess I’m just gonna have to take care of this myself,” he says, and spreads his legs to give his brother the perfect view of his swollen cock, which is rock hard and glistening with arousal. He groans as his fingers slide around his length, lashes plunging halfway down as he slowly drags his fingers from the base to the wet tip, then drags the foreskin down to reveal the fat, ruddy head. 

He lets his teeth crush down on his lower lip demurely just for show, his gaze hungry as it roams across the space between them and settles on his brother.

Vergil eyes him for a moment, with a faint, wry half-smile, appreciating the view. His cock is already stiff as stone, but somehow it manages to harden even more watching Dante flaunt himself in such a manner. “You have no shame,” he says.

Dante’s beauty mitigates the crudeness of the display as only beauty can, blurring the line between pornography and art. But his technique leaves much to be desired. Vergil frowns. “You’re not even doing that right.” 

_Jackpot_ , Dante thinks to himself as he smothers the grin threatening to break across his mouth.

Instead, he just starts to lazily pump, dragging his fingers up and down the shaft as he fucks up into his fist. “Yeah well,” he says as his fingers slide over slick, hard flesh and brush over the tip. “My douchebag of a brother decided he didn’t wanna fuck me anymore, so I had to take care of myself.” He groans softly as his fingers swirl lightly over the glossy glans, coating them with precum, which he drags down his length before giving himself a squeeze. 

He licks his lips as he tilts his head slightly, letting his eyes slide down to his brother’s cock, which juts up hard and proud. He’d love nothing more than to have that back inside him, but Vergil’s decided to be a fucking _tease_ , so Dante’s just going to have to turn the tables.

He raises his wet fingers up to his lips and sucks the taste of himself off of them slowly, moaning as he lets his eyes close in a decadent display of glorious debauchery. 

Vergil’s eyes narrow. He reaches into the refrigerator and pulls out the corked bottle of champagne he’d used for the Bellinis, opening it with a twist of his wrist, watching Dante all the while. “Amateur, Dante. You should leave this to one who knows better.”

He takes a drink from the bottle, since apparently they’re being uncouth.

“Stop that at once.”

Dante just gives Vergil a sultry look as he drags his fingers out of his mouth with a wet pop, smearing saliva down his chin. “Make me,” he says petulantly, with a smirk curling over his mouth as he slides his hand down between his legs, sucking in a sharp breath as the slick pads of his fingers rub over the furrowed pucker of his asshole, sending a tendril of heat curling back up into his gut. He slowly, deliberately, runs his fingers around the rim, watching his brother with eyes slitted with lust.

“Seems like you’re doing fine on your own,” says Vergil, taking another hit from the bottle.

The old Dante would have never let him get away with this, he thinks, amused. His brother has changed, and it does not dismay him. He corks the champagne and puts it away.

“If you don’t mind being second best.” He pauses. “You never have before.”

Dante huffs a breath of amusement at that, his fingers stilling. “Second best, huh?” He raises a brow slightly and withdraws his fingers. He knows that Vergil is right—there really is no one in this world who could ever satisfy him the way his brother can, but at least, for right now, he can tease him just enough to maybe get his brother’s cock back where he wants it. “We’ll see about that.” 

He shifts and turns once more onto his hands and knees so that he can present himself all the more luridly to his brother. Spreading his legs and arching his back slightly, Dante lowers himself down onto a forearm as he reaches between his legs with his other hand, fingers sliding up towards his slick, hungry entrance.

“Whoreishness, Dante.” Vergil gets off the dry bon mot without straining his voice, but he isn’t unmoved by the sight of his brother wantonly fingering himself on a pool table. It’s crude, yes, but also effective, striking a chord that appeals to the primal core. He closes the refrigerator, loitering elegantly for a moment.

He holds this indolent pose until the ache becomes too great, and the call of his brother’s blood too sirenous and strong.

Vergil’s voice drops into his chest. “You know the fun thing about that little parlor trick, Dante? It can take you away, or it can take you back.” With those words, he teleports again, groaning as he finds himself abruptly hilt-deep, sheathed in his brother once more.

A note of shocked pleasure rocks through the room.

Dante can barely think past the white hot pleasure of being abruptly, violently filled. He clenches hard around his brother’s cock as the hand that had been sliding between his legs slams back down onto the surface of the pool table. “ _Holy shit—_ ” he gasps out, shuddering as he takes in the feeling of being stretched so wonderfully around his brother’s cock, the solid weight of Vergil against his back, his scent suffusing the air. 

As his body adjusts to his brother, it suddenly occurs to him that he beat Vergil at his own damn game. He bursts out laughing, bright and loud.

“What’s so funny?” drawls Vergil, returning to the punishing cadence he’d left, without hesitation. He strokes in and out of Dante like a well-oiled piston, with perfect rhythm and vicious precision. “You won’t be laughing in a minute.”

“Oh _fuck_ yeah, _right_ there—” Dante groans, still half laughing, as he finds himself pummeled with overwhelming sensation that floods through him relentlessly. It’s the oddest feeling—laughing through such intense, savage pleasure as he’s roughly fucked open, his body shaking with the brutality of it. 

“I just—” he tries to say, but Vergil’s cock drives in at that exact moment and Dante cries out, a quake making its way down his thighs as his hips snap back to meet his brother’s stroke. “I—” he tries again, but Vergil doesn’t give him any room at all to form words, or to even form _thought_. 

Vergil thrusts in particularly hard and settles deep, lingering and grinding. “It’s good to hear you laugh again,” he says, chasing his breath for a moment.

It isn’t quite that he ever stopped laughing, at least in public.

Since his return, Vergil has realized that Dante is no longer the little brother he left behind. It stands to reason, after so many years, and given all that’s passed. Despite his superficial persona, Dante is a man shaped by mourning and driven by regret. His cavalier jokes fall away when they are alone, and sometimes when he looks at Vergil too long, the pain in his gaze is palpable. Vergil’s lightest touch can bring him to grief. He breaks down over small moments that speak of untapped magnitudes.

Dante’s humor, he sees now, has always been defensive—even when they were nineteen, and his brother seemed determined to chase him to the ends of the earth. It was the insouciance of a wounded young man, desperate to make his older brother believe he didn’t care. Through V’s unilateral gaze, Vergil was certain his dear brother had not changed. At a glance, Dante was the same as ever; swaggering, bombastic, sarcastic and prone to bold and questionable fashion choices. There was some wry grit in his cheer, to be sure, but no more than might be expected of a mercenary who’d spent his life fighting an infernal scourge.

Yet when Vergil returned to himself, and beheld his brother with his own eyes, as Dante looked at last upon his face in turn, he saw that he was much mistaken. There were, of all things, tears in his eyes. Emotions warred in Dante’s gaze, and across his face, and he made no move to guard them—disbelief, foremost, then rage and pain and guilt and sorrow, and all of this overlying, Vergil realized with quiet surprise in that newborn moment, nothing more or less than love.

After that, he sees Dante’s longstanding act for what it is now, what it has become: a jaded play, performed by a wounded and weary man, to hold himself apart and keep the world at bay. To hold himself together, and keep his own self-loathing at bay.

This laughter, this current interaction, has a new dynamic—closer, perhaps, to when they were children; there is relief in the sound, as if something that healed wrong has broken again, and can perhaps be set right, in time.

“I’m glad I could amuse you.”

There is a lightness to their dynamic that hadn’t been there before. 

Not since the first time they lost each other, at eight years old.

There was always another battle to fight; another demon to kill; a futile quest for power to fulfill. And all along, Dante chased after his brother—trying to keep him in his arms, where he belonged. Trying to hold fast, because he never wanted to let go. But Vergil always seemed to slip out between his fingers, no matter how tightly he tried to hold on. 

It wasn’t easy to find moments of brightness; moments that could have been filled with laughter; moments of true happiness. There was always a lingering shadow waiting to plunge them back into the dark. 

And though they could have been happy together, Vergil never stayed long enough for them to find out. He was always chasing after something greater than himself; something more powerful than all the love Dante had tried to give him. 

Those days are far behind them now. 

Vergil has made it clear that he’s chosen to stay; that he’ll never leave again; that he’ll wake up in the morning and walk down the street to buy coffee and pastries and kiss his little brother awake. 

And though there are times when Dante still feels like he might just break under the staggering weight of the past, in this moment, here with his brother, who drinks champagne straight out of the bottle and calls him a little slut, who laughs before he teleports away mid-fuck _just_ to get him riled up, Dante can let himself forget that he’d lost him at all. He can let himself believe that this has always been their forever—the sound of Vergil’s quiet laughter in his ears; the shape of his smile blooming at the corners of his mouth; the feel of him buried deep within; the all-encompassing depth of his love.

It’s easier to find a reason to laugh in this moment. 

Easier for it to come openly, without anything weighing it down. 

It feels good, to be able to laugh like this with Vergil now.

“You know, Verge,” Dante says breathlessly, as he pushes himself up onto his arms, and then glances over his shoulder with a grin as bright as the sun, “if you wanna make me laugh more, all you gotta do is teleport into my ass.” 

As soon as those words leave his mouth, Dante dissolves into another peal of laughter. 

“I wasn’t sure it would work,” Vergil says, unsmiling but amused. “But here we are.”

He shifts, on a whim, urging Dante to turn with him, easing them both down—onto their sides, onto green felt.

He is still inside his brother, his cock hard and willing. He grasps the underside of Dante’s thigh and pushes it up, spreading his brother before him as he begins to fuck him slowly, almost casually. But there is nothing casual in the feelings it evokes, to lie like this, caging his brother and filling his body, his other hand holding him reverently by the lower throat.

Vergil turns into his brother’s neck and drags his lips along his pulse. “Here we are,” he repeats, softly, like a benediction.

Dante groans as Vergil grinds in deep and slow—a rolling, rocking rutting straight into his core. Like this, he can feel his brother’s entire body pressed warm against his back; can feel his heart, beating through his skin. 

They have all the time in the world now to enjoy each other. 

They no longer have to rush towards the only salvation they ever found in each other’s arms; they can slow down and linger over these quiet, aching pleasures, and the smooth, slick slide of their bodies as they rock together. There’s no frantic urge to devour; no desperate grasping, not knowing if there will be a tomorrow. There’s only this: Dante’s soft moans as his brother makes love to him; a seeking mouth turning to find its twin. 

Vergil cranes his neck, tilts his head to honor Dante’s wordless request for his kiss. His brother’s lips are scarcely parted, softly held, and he catches them against his own, feeling their full, satin texture—a supple counterpoint to all the things about Dante that are hard and unyielding.

It deepens immediately, as he knew it would, and he strains to accept his brother’s loving tongue, to stroke it with his own. There is something erotic in the restriction of the position, the awkward angle, and he savors that, even as he thrusts and groans, even as he wants more.

“This arrangement,” he intones, “stirring though it is, makes it hard for me to kiss you the way you deserve, brother.”

Dante hums an agreement into the kiss, lapping at his brother’s lips with a slick of the tongue. “I could ride you,” he offers, breathing out a soft gasp against Vergil’s mouth.

“You’ve been riding me your whole life,” murmurs Vergil. “Why stop now?” He knows Dante can feel the faint smile on his lips.

He withdraws, as Dante shudders against his mouth. 

“Lie back,” Dante says as he turns, his hands sliding up over his brother’s chiseled chest to press him down onto the table. He straddles Vergil and gazes down on him, taking in the achingly beautiful vision of his brother looking back up at him—his eyes soft and quietly shining with love, his plush mouth curled with a light, indolent smile. There had always been something dark there, something heavy, pressing upon the curve of his smiles in the past; but now all Dante can see is the promise of a sunrise.

His fingers tenderly slide down the side of his brother’s face, and he leans down for a slow, gentle kiss as he shifts to position himself over Vergil’s turgid cock, notching the head back in place. 

With a deep groan, he slides down the length, taking his brother back into him in a single stroke as he deepens the kiss with his tongue dripping back into the heat of Vergil’s mouth. 

Vergil closes his eyes and breathes out as his body enters his brother’s, hands coming to rest on the cut of Dante’s hips. Dante kisses him while he does it, an intimacy which sets off an avalanche of arousal within him, silent and powerful. Still waters run deep, and such are his passions.

“I’ve missed this,” Dante confesses softly against his brother’s mouth, his fingers dragging lightly down the side of Vergil’s face to his neck, and lets his fingers slide around the base of his brother’s throat in a gentle, loving hold that has Vergil’s pulse thundering against his palm. For a moment, he just savors the feeling of fullness, of his brother’s cock pulsing deep within him. Vergil’s breath steams over his lips in a humid rush, the quietest of sighs, and Dante starts to ride him, rocking his hips in deep, slow rolls. 

He settles into it as the heat within him grows, groaning as pleasure runs through him like rivulets. With one more lingering kiss, Dante sits up, raising himself up almost to the tip of his brother’s cock, and then crashes back down with a low moan that has his head rolling back as his eyes close. His fingers slip away from Vergil’s throat and drag down the length of his chest as he wantonly gives himself over to the pleasure of fucking himself on his brother’s cock. 

Dante leans back slightly, a hand coming down behind him to grasp Vergil’s thigh for leverage, and he sets into a relentless, deep, pounding pace that has him crying out with each rough rock of the hips.

Whatever else you might say about him, Dante knows how to put on a show.

Vergil finds himself rapt at the surreal sight of his ridiculous, majestic brother above him, broad-shouldered and bare as he was born, unrestrained by decency and undone by lust. He is magnificent in action, no matter the context, perhaps even more so here than battle. 

For once, Vergil has nothing to say about his technique. 

“What would Nero think, if he could see this?” The indecent thought crosses his mind, and then his lips, wry and dark. 

Dante lets out a single huff of laughter. “He’d probably be— _nnh—_ pretty shocked.” A bead of sweat slides down his temple towards his jaw as he rides his brother hard and fast. 

Dante’s cock is flushed and upthrust, rock-hard and seeping at the tip, glistening drops like dew. Vergil swipes this viscous fluid with a single finger and brings it to his lips, deliberately. It tastes of his brother, and brimstone, and the ocean.

He watches with cool, studious eyes, a faint notch in his brow as he weathers the unrelenting sensations, breathing softly through parted lips, as Dante’s taut and sculpted abdomen ripples with each shift of his hips. His weight is a delicious burden Vergil is pleased to bear.

He lets his hands leave his brother’s hard-cut hips and traverse his torso boldly, gripping and holding him at the shoulders, then the back of the neck. Dante leans forward again into his touch, letting go of the iron grip he had on his thigh, settling his fingers lightly on his abdomen in an appreciative brush.

Dante’s gaze is hazed and hedonic, his cheekbones stained with exertion in the service of passion. His lashes are heavy, where they’ve dropped over his eyes, and he looks down upon Vergil with love and awe and lust. 

Vergil feels the black spiral of orgasm begin to build, and welcomes its gathering power. But he keeps it at bay, for he will see his brother break first. 

“I’m close,” Dante moans as he feels the wild heat within him growing into an inferno, but instead of diving straight into the eye of the storm, he slows down to a deep, dark rhythm, and reaches out for Vergil. He wants his brother’s arms around him, wants to taste him. Wants to have Vergil’s breath in his lungs. His hands grasp around Vergil’s shoulders, and he gives him a tug. “Come give little brother a kiss,” he murmurs between quiet gasps of breath. 

Vergil doesn’t need a second invitation. The words sear him, and he surges forward, the motion smooth and immediate, his arms wrapping around Dante as he brings them chest to chest, hot and hard and heaving. He runs his palms over the muscles of Dante’s sweat-slicked back before clutching it, locking his embrace, and finding his brother’s waiting mouth with his own. Dante’s fingers plunge into his hair, his mouth wet and wanting, his tongue hungrily seeking out Vergil’s. He moans into the kiss as their tongues slide together. 

It’s sloppy and passionate and perfect, and Dante swallows down Vergil’s breath like it’s his own. Like this, he can drown in everything that’s Vergil and fall forever into his embrace; he can spend the rest of his life falling, and he supposes that wouldn’t be such a terrible fate, because at least they would finally fall together. Deeper than they’ve ever fallen before. Into a love so powerful, it transcends worlds and time and even the boundary between life and death. They can rise within their love; soar higher than the stars, and grasp the roof of heaven in their hands. 

“I love you,” Dante whispers against his brother’s mouth. He never did tell Vergil enough when they were young. He’ll never make that mistake again. He’ll tell him every day, for as long as he lives. “I love you so much.” 

Vergil nearly loses it then and there, but he has learned how to master his passions. He knows neither of them will last long, not like this, so he braces a hand against green felt for leverage and thrusts ruthlessly upward, into his brother, striking deep, pulling Dante down onto his cock, one-armed, with taut ferocity.

“Come for me, and I’ll write my name inside you,” he utters on a held breath.

The command stabs through Dante’s body and triggers a brutal wave of heat that coalesces deep inside him before slamming out in a shuddering explosion of white hot, volcanic pleasure that has him crying out Vergil’s name as he erupts, come splattering between their chests as he shakes in his brother’s arms. He comes apart, falling into the rush of the high; falling straight into the fire where he burns brighter than he has in a long, long time. 

All the breath rushes out of him as his heart soars.

And for the first time, he allows himself to be happy in a way he hasn’t been in over twenty years. 

Vergil curses softly at the sight and sound of his brother’s ecstasy, as hot liquid anoints them. Dante’s climax—loud and brash and unapologetic—spurs his own. His brow notches. The gathering darkness rolls forward like thunder, tips over the precipice, and implodes like a sun. He buries his face in Dante’s warm, hard chest as it wracks him, wave after wave, weathering the violent convulsions, tense and silent. His arms clutch his brother, his love, as he shoots his essence deep inside him.

In the aftermath, he shudders.

It feels like it goes on forever.

Dante feverishly moans as he wraps his arms around Vergil and shelters him in a clutching embrace. His fingers plunge into his brother’s hair as his face sinks down, nose brushing against the crown of Vergil’s head. He feels whole and sated and warm with the fullness of his brother deep inside of him, his innermost walls coated with the mark of his brother’s ownership. Vergil has scrawled his name inside of him indelibly, seared it into the softest, most vulnerable parts of him. 

It carves out his place in the world—wrapped up in his brother’s love.

Dante is breathless and euphoric, utterly blissed out.

He makes a soft sound of contentment, nuzzling at his brother gently as he allows Vergil to hide a little longer in his arms.

There is something about the way Dante puts his arms around him—wholehearted, encompassing—that sends a warm, overwhelming rush through Vergil, and makes him surrender to it. He realizes, in that moment, that he is both loved, and protected, whether he needs it or not. Whether he wants it or not.

He does want it.

He wonders why he denied it for so long. 

Of everyone on earth, no one is as dauntless and indomitable as his little brother; no one as capable or worthy a defender. No one as stubbornly defiant when denied, or as achingly devoted when embraced.

Vergil breathes out slowly, regripping his brother’s body.

His cock has yet to soften, but his heart is no longer hard.

Dante’s fingers gently stroke through his brother’s hair. He closes his eyes and breathes, just _breathes_ him in. Vergil smells like the night, like the fine edge of a blade. Dark and rich and earthy. Dante could breathe him in forever, searching for the notes of his brother’s true scent, buried underneath the musk of expensive cologne. Just having him like this, in his arms, with the scent of him in his nose, filling up his lungs, is all Dante ever really wanted—to be able to love him, to be able to protect him, to have him close enough to hold. 

He holds him now, letting Vergil remain for as long as he needs in the sanctuary of his arms. 

Vulnerability has never been easy for his brother. 

It’s a trait that’s far too human—devils don’t know how to be vulnerable. They don’t have the capacity for love.

But Vergil has both in great abundance, even if he’d spent a lifetime trying to kill the human part of him that Dante has always loved. After all, this is the part of Vergil that buries his face in his little brother’s chest. The part of Vergil that trembles. The part of him that holds Dante like he’s the only thing tethering him to the world—and maybe he is. 

An anchor for humanity. A reason to live in the sun. 

Dante loves his brother. 

He tells him with a soft kiss pressed to his forehead. 

Vergil is aware that they are on a pool table. That nothing they’ve done should feel so reverent and holy. That his brother is utterly, unselfconsciously naked, and he is still wearing pants and booted to the knee. But even in these loving expressions of depravity they’ve indulged, there is a truth that can never go unrealized for long.

He takes a breath and draws back, letting it go. His arms ease, releasing Dante from his death grip. “That was...transcendent.”

Vergil doesn’t know what else to call it.

Dante huffs a soft, amused breath, his fingers continuing to stroke gently through his brother’s soft hair. “Transcendent, huh? I guess that’s one way of putting it.” He might’ve called it something else. Earth shattering, perhaps. Or, if he wanted to be crude: a really hot fuck. But Vergil isn’t wrong—it was transcendent. It always is. Their lovemaking has always been powerful enough to shake the universe.

Vergil closes his eyes for a moment, listening inward. The blood is pleased and quiet now; humming, indulgent. He is full of the chemistry that bonds him to his brother, brimming with warmth and well-being. It’s a marvelous drug.

“I could sleep here,” he says, with a chuckle, and a faint, drowsy smile. 

He’s beautiful when he’s unguarded like this, Dante thinks to himself with his breath quietly held somewhere between his second and third rib. Vergil is always beautiful, but here he is bare, defenseless. Willing to embrace the human part of him that he’s always abjured. Willing to let his little brother hold him in his arms and let his walls fall. There is power in that, in the courage it takes to let go. To be fearless in the face of vulnerability, to let it linger right here in the open for Dante to love. 

Dante can’t see his brother’s face, but he can feel the shape of his smile against his skin. Can hear it in the timbre of his laughter, which falls as softly as a rainfall in spring. 

“Sleep kill those pretty eyes,” he murmurs with a soft smile curving his lips, calling upon memory to serve what he knows his brother will surely love, “and give as soft attachment to thy senses.”

“Careful,” murmurs Vergil, in a graveled subtone. “You’ll make me hard again.”

He’s only half joking; he’s still half-hard.

He doesn’t want to disengage from Dante, or end this pastoral aftermath just yet. Still, he is aware there are more comfortable places they could be.

He breathes out against his brother’s bare chest, letting Dante’s scent suffuse him. “I’m not too spent to do that parlor trick again.”

Dante chuckles quietly, and his fingers trace down the the hemisphere of his brother’s head to grasp at the nape of his neck. He shifts back, slightly—enough so that he can gaze upon Vergil, hold his face in his hands. He lifts his brother’s chin up gently with the lightest of touches, his mouth shaped into a soft smile. “Guess I’ll just have to atone some more, huh?” 

He doesn’t wait for an answer before his mouth descends.

*

When they make love again, it is slow and aching. Each touch is a prayer fulfilled; each kiss, a benediction. Their bodies curve and bend together, joined in carnal communion. This is a ritual as old as time, as sacred as heaven. There is love here, and grace, found in these holy moments. There is forgiveness, too. Redemption on the wings of a shudder. Absolution in a kiss. 

They might not ever truly forgive themselves. 

But they can find forgiveness in the other.

Sometimes, that’s good enough.

*****

They lie spent and sated in the heat of a bath as mist settles upon the pre-dawn world, darkness fading into light rising in the east. 

Dante presses soft kisses down the curve of his brother’s neck as he drags soapy hands over warm skin, relishing the feeling of Vergil underneath his fingers. Savoring the gift of being able to serve his brother in this most intimate act of bathing, taking care of him the same way Vergil has for him, so many times before. “You should let me do this more, brother,” he whispers softly, as his hands dip under the surface of water and glide down Vergil’s chest.

Vergil shifts, slightly, settling deeper into the water. He is leaning back in Dante’s embrace; his arms resting partly on Dante’s knees and partly on the edge of the tub. The old clawfoot is a large one, but it’s a cozy fit for the two of them. Neither of them consider that a drawback. “I should let you do a lot of things,” says Vergil, quietly.

He remembers being here before, but never with their places reversed. It feels like a moment out of time. Vergil closes his eyes as Dante trickles water over his chest. He’s being playful, yet serious. It’s an interesting side of him.

“Do you think it could have always been like this?” Vergil asks.

Had he not sought power. Had he not chosen to fall, or had Dante fallen with him—would their youthful bond have brought them here, or was what they’d endured truly what was required to bring them to this place, this armistice?

Dante’s hands abruptly stop. 

The question is one he used to ask himself when he was alone, with only the memory of his brother to keep him warm at night.

He would close his eyes and imagine a world where his brother still lived; a world where he never fell; a world where he walked alongside Dante during the day and wrapped his arms around him at night. A world where they would still bicker and fight and make each other bleed, and sometimes, Vergil might even run him through, and Dante would rage and seethe; but then, Vergil would tenderly take him into his arms. He would make love to him to reaffirm the sacredness of a union that transgressed and transcended the limits of human love. He would have smiled the way he sometimes did, in secret, behind the safety of walls, where no one else but his other half could witness the humanity he put on display.

He would have been happy, perhaps, even without ruling the underworld.

They could have been happy, together.

They could have had a lifetime of love; a lifetime where they were not separated like Castor and Pollux, burning with longing for the other, but fated to be apart for an eternity in the night sky. A lifetime where they could have had moments like this—moments of peace. Moments where they could have stepped out of the skin they wore in the world, and into the quiet truth of themselves—Dante and Vergil. Together at last.

It could have been beautiful.

It should have been.

But it’s pointless to dwell on what could have been. Those years are lost to them forever—all they have now is this moment, the future, and each other. 

Dante makes a noncommittal hum, and dips his hand back into the water, letting it sluice between his fingers to wash the suds off his brother’s skin. “Yeah,” he says after a moment. “I think it could’ve. But we can’t go back in time, brother.” There’s a quiet resignation in his voice. “All we can do is look forward.”

“All true,” says Vergil, letting his head fall back against Dante’s chest.

He is slightly surprised by his brother’s subdued, pragmatic response. As soon as the words had left his lips, he’d cringed and regretted them, afraid it would send Dante back into that desolate place he’d been falling into all week, any time the past intruded on the present.

Perhaps something has at last begun to heal.

For himself, he knows it is not something he will ever stop regretting, as the primary architect of their anguish, but he also knows that the lives they’ve lived apart have minted the men they’ve become. It’s only been a week, but he loves this Dante as much as any, and can’t imagine a world, or a life, without him.

“If it hadn’t happened,” Vergil says, “I wouldn’t have you. Not as you are right now. And I don’t know if I’d be willing to trade that.”

“But you would have had me, Vergil,” Dante says quietly, as his hands fall into the water and come to rest on Vergil’s chest. “You would have had me.” 

Sure, it wouldn’t have been this version of himself—this version who had grown old without his brother; who at times, can’t look at his own reflection in the mirror; who lived most of his life not really living at all; who couldn’t stop mourning; who didn’t know how to let go of his brother’s memory, because that meant letting go of his love. And how do you let go of a thing like that? An emotion so strong, it gave life meaning and purpose; a reason to stand up and fight and live and breathe and chase after a brother who embodied everything he’d ever wanted or needed, everything he could never quite keep locked in his arms. 

How do you let go of his memory, when you never should’ve let him fall? 

This version of himself is one who had lost too much—a lifetime, a brother, his entire world. He doesn’t burn as brightly as he once did; his edges are blunted, his light dulled. When he lost Vergil, he lost an integral part of himself that he knows he’ll never get back, even though life miraculously gave him back his brother. 

They could have burned together, bright in their glory days. In another life, another world, another him. 

It wouldn’t have been the same version of himself that now holds his brother in his arms; but it still would’ve been some form of him who would have loved Vergil just as deeply. Some version of himself who would’ve ended up, right here, in this bathtub, after living a lifetime of love and happiness with his brother. 

“And I would have had you.” 

The thought of it is devastating. 

It cracks straight through the hazy warmth he’d been floating through in the aftermath of their lovemaking. 

It dredges up an old ache, one Dante is far too familiar with. 

He closes his eyes and drops his face down into the curve of his brother’s neck, shifting to slide his arms around Vergil, holding onto him tightly.

Vergil feels his brother’s grief return in a physical way, as if it enters him through the embrace with a sweep of black wings. He feels his face contort with the empathetic resonance of it.

“Dante,” he says, very softly, staring straight ahead, into nothing. “I’m the one who did this to us. To you. That’s something I will have to carry, always. I can’t forgive myself for the ruthless choices I made in my youth. But you can. You have that power over me, because I give it to you. I give you my life, brother. I will find no other absolution.”

He reaches a hand up to grasp Dante’s arms where they cross his chest. His brother’s embrace is crushing; warm and strong, in spite of his grief—or perhaps because of it.

“When we first returned, not once did you deny me, in spite of all I’d done. The moment we were left alone, you took me in your arms. Even after all these years. And though I could not forgive myself, I was able to let you forgive me. To accept your forgiveness.”

He threads his fingers gently into Dante’s clenched fist.

“Who’s to say what twenty-four years means to us, Dante? Father lived for hundreds.”

Father wasn’t half-human, Dante thinks to himself, as his fingers tighten gently around his brother’s. 

He doesn’t even know if he and Vergil are physically the same age anymore. They certainly don’t look it. Vergil doesn’t have any of the signs that life had ravaged onto Dante’s skin; he looks far younger, achingly so. Sometimes looking at him, Dante wonders if they even have the same lifespan anymore. 

He doesn’t know how many more years they’ll have together. 

But he does know what time he has left on this piece of earth, he wants to share with his brother. He also knows that he doesn’t want to spend the rest of his life not being able to forgive himself for having lost Vergil in the first place. 

But forgiveness is as heavy as a loaded gun. 

And Dante just can’t seem to pull the trigger.

Maybe one day, that’ll change. Maybe, with time, and his brother’s love, he’ll be able to forgive himself. Maybe Vergil will find some way to do the same. 

He sighs softly and turns his face into his brother’s damp hair, breathing in his clean scent. For a moment, he just holds him, soaking up the warmth and the feel of Vergil in his arms. And then he says, quietly, trying to push some levity into his tone, “So, you’re just gonna have to make it up to me for the next twenty-four years, huh?” 

“And more,” says Vergil. He leans back into Dante’s arms, turning his face so that his eyes meet his brother’s. “I love you; from the cradle to the grave.”

“I love you too, Vergil. I always have.” 

Dante’s smile, soft and faint, is as warm as the rising sun.

*

It’s either very late, or very early, but it doesn’t matter. They can sleep in as long as they want; there’s nothing that can’t wait, for once. Vergil is tired, in the good way—the way that bespeaks a life lived fully, and not the cracked and weary drag of bitterly wandering whilst crumbling to dust. He is reborn, re-minted, and this soft and tender human exhaustion is a gift he’d never expected to know again.

Dante had insisted on toweling him off, drying his hair. It led to a bit of brotherly horseplay, and before long they were kissing again, clutched into each other with silent intensity.

“Let’s go to bed,” Vergil had murmured.

But Dante has not come to bed yet, so he waits up a bit, clean and naked beneath his brother’s covers, reading idly to pass the time. 

He’s not in love with the linens, but they’re clean, and smooth, and pleasant against his skin. He’ll be sure to get something with a higher percale, soon enough. For now, his brother’s magnificent body beside him is more than enough luxury—one Dante appears to be delaying. 

Just as Vergil begins to consider calling for him, Dante appears in the doorway, gloriously naked as the day he was born. He’s holding the box of pastries in one hand, and has the open bottle of champagne in the other. There’s a half-eaten Danish in his mouth. It’s all rather unseemly.

Vergil smiles faintly. “Breakfast in bed, huh. I suppose it’s better late than never.” He could say that about a lot of things.

Dante grins around the pastry and swaggers up to the bed. He hands the bottle of champagne to Vergil, climbs up onto the bed, holding the pastry box aloft like a trophy, and then finally takes a proper bite of the Danish, chewing. “These are pretty damn good, Verge,” he says around a mouthful of pastry. 

They’re definitely better than leftover, cold pizza in the morning, though Dante sure as hell isn’t going to admit that to his brother and give him the pleasure of being right. 

He opens the box and digs out another Danish and offers it to Vergil.

Vergil eyes him for a moment, then takes his brother’s offering. “Thank you,” he says, belatedly. He looks at the bottle in his hand, shrugs, smirks, tips it at Dante and takes a drink.

It’s not exactly what he had planned, but given his and Dante’s vastly divergent general agendas, he decides to accord it a successful compromise. 

It is fascinating to Vergil, how much easier it has proved to be in alignment with Dante than at odds with him. He had thought this would be difficult; that no concession from him would ever be enough, unless it were utter and complete. He had somehow always imagined his little brother would take no less from him, that someone of Dante’s relentless and unwavering single-minded drive, fully convinced of the rightness of his own might, would never appreciate the virtues and nuance of mitigation.

But he was wrong about that. Dante is only absolutist and bombastic when he feels insecure, when he fears, when he’s afraid of losing something.

Right now, he is merely happy, lounging beside Vergil and laying waste to a Danish.

“You went with cheese,” says Vergil. “A fine choice.” He holds the bottle out to him, which Dante takes a swig from, before wiping his mouth with the back of his hand. Vergil eyes him sidelong, and shakes his head.

“Yeah, I figured you’d want the one with chocolate,” Dante explains as he finishes off the last bite of his Danish and licks the sugar off each of his sticky fingers. “Remember how we used to fight over that when we were kids?” A wistful smile forms on his face as he reaches for another Danish filled with strawberry jam. “You never liked sharing your chocolate.” 

“You always liked trying to take it,” Vergil counters, enunciating each word precisely. The memory is a sweet one, though, now that they are together again; decoupled from loss, freed from the burden of all that came after.

When he glances over, Dante is already eyeing his Danish. Vergil looks at him for a beat, wryly amused. “Would you like a bite?” he says.

Dante’s eyebrows raise up slightly with a lopsided grin. “Hey, if you’re offering…” 

This little pleasure is one that he never thought he’d be able to enjoy—eating from his brother’s hand in his bed, as daylight works its way into his room. He takes a small bite of Vergil’s pastry, eyes never once leaving his brother’s, and then chews, swallowing the bite and licking chocolate off his lips with a slow, sultry lap of the tongue. “Pretty good,” he says, as he works his way a little closer to Vergil. “But you know what’s better?” 

“Having the whole thing to yourself?”

“This.” Dante kisses his brother, luxuriating in the sweetness of a kiss that tastes like chocolate and champagne. 

“Ah,” Vergil says softly. “This. Yes.”

Dante grins and steals another slow, indulgent kiss. He pulls away to settle down next to his brother, leaning against him slightly as he takes a drink from the champagne bottle. His eyes drift somewhere into the distance. “I can’t believe this is real,” he admits quietly after a moment. “Feels too good to be true.” 

“We deserve some good for a change.” Vergil takes the bottle back and drinks. Dante’s arm is warm and companionable against his own. The world is still, as if no one else exists. “We paid for this in blood. It’s ours, Dante. Enjoy it.”

Dante nods and inelegantly shoves half his strawberry Danish into his mouth in response.

It’s strange, being able to lie here now with his brother, warm and naked and fucked out, eating pastries and drinking champagne out of the bottle, without having to worry about anything else. It had never been like this in the past; Vergil always had somewhere else he needed to be, something more important to attend to. Dante always felt like he was trying not to lose him, always desperate to hold on. 

But now, they can just lie here and let the world outside drift by. 

They can fuck all night and eat pastries and drink champagne and just _enjoy it._

Vergil isn’t going anywhere. I give you my life, he said. 

Dante isn’t even sure what he’s supposed to do with that kind of power, other than to hold it carefully in his hands.

Vergil watches as Dante polishes off his second Danish, sighs, and turns his head to face him. The look in his light eyes is one of intense and present adoration, as if he cannot look away, as if he cannot look at Vergil enough. Yet there’s a chronic weariness in their depths, and a long-standing tiredness around them. Slight dark circles swathe their undersides.

It isn’t just that Dante spent his entire day in a hectic fury, trying to find him. Or that they wore each other out all night with full contact carnal games, though both those things are part of it. But they’re mere interest on a bitter capital—his brother has not truly rested for twenty-four years.

Vergil traces one of the dark swathes with his thumb, as he brushes Dante’s hair out of his face.

“You should sleep,” he says, finally, in a low, somnolent voice. “I was exhausted; used up and burned out, too. Falling apart, really.” He huffs out a soft laugh. “But I was restored. You need to restore, Dante.”

“You calling me used up and burned out?” Dante shoots right back without thinking, a brow arching as his typical half-cocked grin makes its way across his mouth. “ _Ouch._ And here I thought that you found me irresistible. What, is my sex appeal not enough for ya?” 

“I do find you irresistible.” Dante’s sex appeal is glaring and undeniable, like a peacock’s. “That’s part of the problem, brother mine.” Vergil cups his jaw, caressing it idly. “If you can’t take pity on yourself, take pity on me. Give me a brief respite before your demon comes calling mine out to play, yet again.”

Dante makes a soft, amused sound and he dips his face down slightly, pressing his lips against the curve of Vergil’s palm. 

He _is_ exhausted, in a way that is bone-deep and weary, and is only able to keep himself awake by sheer willpower alone. He doesn’t want the night to end—sleep is when he’s most defenseless, and the last time he went to sleep, he woke up alone. Some part of him still fears that’ll be the case. That he’ll go to sleep and wake up and Vergil will be gone again, except this time, he won’t return. 

“Then let’s go to sleep, brother,” he says softly, placing just enough emphasis on the _let’s_. 

“I want to read for a little while,” says Vergil. “It’s how I unwind.” He smiles slowly, and there’s an ominous touch to it. “Keeps me human.”

He curls his hand around the back of Dante’s neck and urges him close.

“Sleep, brother. I’ll watch over you, until I slip the bonds of consciousness and find you in your dreams.”

“You’re already there,” Dante says softly, even as he lets his brother draw him closer, sliding up against him. “And also, you got it backwards. I’m always the one who finds you.” 

“Perhaps it’s my turn, then.” Vergil puts his arm around Dante, encouraging him to lie against his side. “To follow you for a change.” He presses an absent kiss to his brother’s thick shag, remembering when they were children, when Dante had climbed into his bed, shaking, and held him close. He asks the same question now that he did then. “What are you afraid of?”

It’s a loaded question.

Dante could probably answer with a typical throwaway line. He could maybe even lie. But somehow, in this sacred golden moment, it wouldn’t feel right. And Vergil certainly wouldn’t let him just get away with avoiding the question, either. 

For a tense moment, silence rolls out between them. 

Outside, the world wakes. Cars drive past, their tires rattling over cobblestone. Footsteps resound on the pavement. A bird sings, somewhere in the distance. 

“I dunno, Verge. I guess I just don’t want to lose you again,” Dante finally says into the quiet morning calm, brows pinching together. He averts his gaze, busying himself with pulling the covers up to his chin, and immediately burrows close to his brother, sliding an arm around his waist.

Vergil closes his eyes for a moment. “It will take...time, Dante, for you to begin to trust me. It was a miscalculation on my part, to leave without waking you. No more surprises. And when you wake, I’ll be here.” He can feel his heart beating against his brother’s. It is in counterpoint, now, but he knows it will synchronize, slowly, as the blood inside then comes into proximate harmony. “You’ll see.”

“Okay,” Dante finally concedes, but he still drapes himself a little more effectively over his brother, to soak up his warmth and presence, and to ensure that he’ll wake if Vergil were to try and leave the bed. Vergil’s reassurance helps settle the shifting waters that had been swirling around his ankles, and the old fear takes a seat again. Enough to allow Dante to finally begin to surrender to sleep’s siren song. “I’ll kick your ass if you leave me again,” he mumbles sleepily, snuggling his face against his brother, and yawns.

“I would expect nothing less,” says Vergil, opening his book once more, absently letting his fingers caress Dante’s temple. It’s not much later that he feels the slow, even breathing of slumber from his brother. He glances down at him and smiles. “Weirdo,” he whispers. Dante is crashed out, beautiful and graceless, like an angel who’s hit a plate glass window. He resumes the idle stroking, and his reading.

Eventually he sets the book aside on the nightstand, careful not to rouse his brother. It’s not until he reaches for the bedside light that Dante stirs. He blinks awake blearily, hand grasping at Vergil’s side, and looks up at him, half-asleep. 

“Still here,” Dante murmurs, as if confirming the fact, and then closes his eyes again, nuzzling back down against Vergil. 

“Always,” intones Vergil, as he winds his arms around his brother and settles in beside him. Soon he is dreaming, deep and sweet, now that Dante has slain his nightmares. 

They sleep well through the day and into the afternoon, as the sun makes its way across the sky. 

When Dante wakes up, he finds himself still wrapped up in the arms of his brother, who held him the entire time he’d slept. He kisses him awake, slowly, and murmurs against his lips, “Morning.” 

Vergil smiles sleepily as he strokes his fingers indulgently through Dante’s hair and whispers, “Good morning.” 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

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